The Three Body Problem By Liu Cixin

Audiobook version, narrated by Bruno Roubicek

Finished on 1/19/2017

6.5 Moralizing Alien Cults and -1.5 Hard SciFi out of 5

Spoiler-tastic Review

I read this as a part of the Sword and Laser Book Club.

This was a good book. I’m starting with that because I must admit I got bored with this book at several points while listening to it. I liked the (as far as I know) hard sci-fi aspects of this novel, I loved the setting of China past and present and I even liked the alien invasion plot. It was a throwback to the golden age of the scifi genre where authors used actual science as a solution to the problems in their plots. This is at odds with the technobabble employed by Star Trek, fake words used to solve the plot. That was fantastic.

HOWEVER. This book had problems. Most of the characters were barely two dimensional. Mr. Wang, for example, was defined by his scienfitic aspirations. We didn’t really meet his wife or child, talk with his friends, learn his individual quirks and phobias. Most of the other characters were like this too. Even the detective Da Shi, who I liked, was the trope of a dirty cop personified. And the number of flashbacks in this book turned me off a little.

Net total I did like this book and am happy that I read it. I would suggest a friend to read it, if that friend were a big scifi fan.