📚 Finished reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I remember this book got pretty rave reviews when it was published in English (and probably before - but I can only read English). Obama liked it. George R. R. Martin, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergtoo. But don’t let that put you off, plenty of people with less wealth and, depending on your point of view, megalomaniac desires like it too. It also won a Hugo Award in 2015.
I left it some time, trying to wait until I felt like I’d the opportunity to really dedicate time and focus to appreciating it fully. Naturally that time never came, but thankfully I gave it a go anyway. And, predictably, also loved it.
The subject matter is pretty attuned to my interests. We start with 1960s Chinese politics, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Our protagonist is unfortunate enough to watch her father die in a struggle session. She herself is arrested for suspicion of not being a good enough Communist. The prospective penalties are severe.
By the end we’ve worked our way through alien civilisations, conspiracies, detectives, spies and, metaversey-stuff, with some nice doses of science and philosophy. Inexplicable phenomena abound; why are a bunch of scientists killing themselves? What condition is causing someone to see numbers wherever he looks? What actually is the purpose of the strange military installation? Or the VR game that seems to have appeared out of nowhere?
But what always fascinates me most of all are authors’ ideas about the weird ways that human society might react when very important, very unprecedented, situations occur. Some of the ones herein might seem unlikely at first, but then again very little can be more wild that the IRL emergence of the QAnon cult and its troubling downstream effects. Would Pizzagate sound realistic had it only appeared in a sci-fi novel?
We’re told that so far “the entire history of humanity has been fortunate” - hard as that is to believe in current times - but sure, perhaps there’s a way in which that’s true in comparison to what is on the agenda here.
The book is not difficult to read despite the depth of the intellectual topics. It’s full of big, awesome, imaginative, and occasionally explicitly philosophical ideas that consumed my brain for a while. I’m sure it’ll stick in my mind for a good long time.
It’s the first book of a trilogy. There’s no way I’m not going to read the others at some point after both the enjoyment this one brought and the way that it ended.
There’s also a TV show version of it expected to come to Netflix next year.
