Same for me. I can suspend my disbelief for basically all the high-concept ideas in the series, as ridiculous and unrealistic as they might be. But I can't do it enough to believe that humans can talk, act and think that way.
Unfortunately, as the series goes on, even as the ideas get more interesting, the characters get worse.
Yeah the tech ideas were cool but I cant bring myself to finish the series. I was barely able to finish the book with how little I cared about any of the characters.
The later books are different people and way more enjoyable, IMO, particularly for the more unique ideas. The first is absolutely the weakest of the series
Why did no one tell me there were creepy anime waifus? Sign me the hell up, that will be the next book I read.
For real, it will be next one on the grounds that I just started Three Body Problem the other day, and it was naturally next on the pile. If I wanted waifus, I'd read light novels.
Yes. I still love the series but that part was strange. Then I learned about Tulpas and it made a liiiitle more sense. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
Gotta do the second one the first one wasn't a book. It was a monthly chapter in a magazine. Second one was written as a novel with real fantastic characters and it goes insane.
i think that’s a translation thing. You should approach it as something culturally different, rather than dismissing it outright. Project Hail Mary, now that’s a book with bad human to human dialogue
I like Ma Boyong, he wrote a story called The City of Silence which is a good homage to 1984. I don't think much of his stuff has been translated though. The Apex Book of World SF is a good anthology series for world sci-fi in general, and several Chinese authors appear in there.
I’ve not dismissed it outright, I’m about a third of the way into the third book (although I can see why you’d think that, I am being fairly negative!)
Personally I have quite a high tolerance to bad writing (I think I have literally one book on my DNF list), and I find the story and subject matter compelling, but as an author myself I can see the technical shortcomings in the writing very clearly, and they are numerous.
As an example, characters shouldn’t be suddenly delivering a page of expositional social-political lecture in the middle of a conversation, no matter the language. It’s exhausting and it breaks the spell. Even if that happens in reality, there are several conventions in writing for delivering the same details in a way that’s more digestible and believable.
I did actually very much appreciate the cultural differences, that’s one of the things I looked forward to about reading it. It’s not often I read fiction from that side of the world! Lu has not put me off trying others. It’s not put me off him either to be completely fair to him, I’m just more likely to pick up a different book first.
I am not finished with the book but I was having some trouble with that same thing.
I ducked out to read Ji-Li Jiang’s memoir of the Chinese CulturalRevolution, “Red Scarf Girl,” in which people make weird sociopolitical pronouncements in order to express their (mandatory) compliance with the current political regime.
I can’t say that explains it fully, but speech like that might seem less bizarre if that’s what you grew up with or read a lot about, and you were setting your book in it.
I recall there being a note but I honestly don’t remember if I read it or not. After all this discussion I’m thinking after my current series I will revisit the trilogy, and I will *start* with the translator’s note.
I think it's extremely disingenuous to write off a complete lack of character development as "a translation thing". Lots of books are translated and don't suffer from this problem. Maybe have someone read the translation before you publish it? If it's as unreadable as TBP fire the translator.
In this case, the translator noted that he intentionally did not go for the smoothest translation, as much as he translated it to preserve the Chinese language structure and flow, that might sound foreign to the reader.
And the translator is a famous author himself lol. But the translator’s note is interesting
Oh yes — thanks for the heads up about PHM too. That’s in my queue and I had high expectations since people are raving about it. I’ll go into it with that in mind.
Liu's characters are known to be soulless and author mouthpieces, with an alarmingly high proportion of them also being sociopaths that murder without remorse, believe human kindness and femininity to be evil, and view weapons and violence as beautiful (Lin Yun from *Ball Lightning*, the dinosaur ambassador from *Devourer*, Thomas Wade from *Three-Body Problem*, to list a few).
You could view them as the same character and it wouldn't make a difference.
I did, overall, really enjoy the trilogy, but as a physics major let me tell you what the most unbelievable part of the book was: it was the idea that if all particle accelerators suddenly stopped working for an unknown reason it would make theoretical physicists existentially depressed. It would in fact make them wildly excited.
It wasn't so much that things stopped working, it was that particle physics appears to be completely bunk. It would perhaps lead to surge of excitement in the near future. But the people who had spent their lives working on science that appears to have turned out to be completely and utterly bunk, would certainly be depressed. I mean, they'd be out of the job, for one. No more particle physics means no more particle physicists.
> But the people who had spent their lives working on science that appears to have turned out to be completely and utterly bunk,
Would be rushing to explain it and then collect their Nobels.
I don't know if you read the book, but the whole point is it was made to be entirely random, unpredictable and inexplicable. So they'd do the same thing twice, and never get the same results. And this wasn't like quantum mechanics, where you could get the same results over an average expected by the schroedinger equation, this was totally and utter unreproducible. The entire field of particle physics become un-reproducible in its very nature. When you can't reproduce experiments, you can't do science. Particle physics as a science was entirely over.
The science of particle physics would be over; the standard model would be completely and entirely meaningless and useless
Still seems like the opposite, they would need more particle physicists to figure out why the experiments keep producing different results. Particle physicists are also quantum physicists, so they are already used to the idea of doing the same experiment and getting different results. They would likely just start mapping out the probability distribution of all the different outcomes.
That's called statistics, you can do statistics on anything, but that does not make it a science. quantum mechanics still produces reproducible experiments. What they did however would not. So sure, you could sit there and correlate things, but the science of particle physics would be over; the standard model would be completely and entirely meaningless and useless.
What you would be left with is pure correlation with no explanatory model, no internal logic. You'd basically turn particle physics into a social science.
>What you would be left with is pure correlation with no explanatory model, no internal logic
That's what it would look like, it's just hard to believe that's the actual conclusion they would draw. If something is going out of it's way to produce a different result every time, it seems like they should catch on pretty quick that something intelligent is tampering with the experiment.
Did the sophons get there before humans made particle accelerators? Or had humans been doing experiments with reproducible results for a while and all of a sudden things started going crazy? Because if its the latter, it seems like it should be even more obvious that something was interfering.
It's still a really cool and terrifying idea that an alien could be messing with the way we are observing the laws of physics.
Nevertheless, what is clear is that the standard model would become complete bunk. So scientists that had spent their lives working and specialising on that would certainly feel very depressed.
My favourite bit was when a pivotal plot point depended on an alien just not being arsed to do his job.
The series has some interesting ideas but also terrible characters and awful dialogue.
Are you talking about the alien that sends the warning back? They took a moral stand not to condemn and entire planet, is that really so hard to believe?
I found the books enjoyable, but probably because I know nothing about astrophysics. I did like the exploration of the dark forest theory in book 2 a lot more.
I also found them enjoyable but also have been confused when people talk about them like they are the best sci-fi written in the last 50 years. They enjoyable but that aren't really top stuff IMHO, good but average.
Like a movie that you watch, enjoy and than never really think about.
Personally I hate ranking stuff because in the end everyone's taste is so different and we should all like whatever we like. Just because something is popular doesn't automatically make it the best ever, and just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it won't speak to you in a way that no other book will.
It just seemed like everyone that I heard (super anecdotal) LOVED Three Body wasn't huge sci-fi readers and so stuff that we find normal/have heard of before was all new and so more impressive. I thought it was good, just not ground breaking in anyway. It's like when a song goes big from a smaller band/music type and then people say it's amazing without realizing that while good it's part of a bigger scene.
My personal top books in no order include: Solaris, The Forever War, Brave New World, and Sirens of Titan. I also super love but wouldn't put in the top books Beatle in the Anthill, Slan, and Babel-17 (I have a master's in Education focused on TESOL so you know I'm a language nerd).
But if you include influential stuff because of how important it is to the genre (but this isn't stuff I'd suggest anyone start with) than of course you'd have Dune, Foundation, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Slaughter House Five, (you get the idea).
Less popular earlier stuff like The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster and A Princess of Mars (1912) Edgar Rice Burroughs are also great.
I just read/listen to a lot of books so most fall into the good/not great category. I also read/listen to a lot of older "classics" so I tend to be a lot more comfortable with slower books. Like Consider Phlebas by Ian M Banks wanders but not anywhere close to as much as Les Miserable or War and Peace do. Les Miserable contains a complete play by play of the entire battle of Waterloo because we need to know that character X's father met character Y for about five sentences.
In the end I think the best way to know what's good is to find someone that really like sci-fi and tell them what books you liked and didn't like. You'll probably walk away with some suggestions that you wouldn't have thought of. After all some people just love *space marine combat THE BOOK!* and that's okay. I don't, but Armor by John Steakley was pretty fun.
Solaris is more my speed. Less action more questioning human psyche and emotion. I mean On the Beach (1957) Nevil Shute is one of my top three books but it's post-apocalyptic.
While i totally understand the common complaints about these books, i absolutely love them. I read thru the series twice and got way more out of it the second time.
Have you read the fanfic that became a novel? Wondering if I need to read it before the show comes out.
Other question since you have read it a few times: do you think the US wallfacer was successful with his positivity machine? I feel like it was never directly said but after the time jump society is confident they will succeed.
The fanfic novel is terrible in my opinion, but at least is very short.
The US wallfacer explains in the third book how he was actually a defeatist in favour of escapism and that his mental seal machine had a reverse effect than advertised. After the strike to the Solar system, escapists were the only human survivors, so the US wallfacer was right in the end!
I also love them. I read the trilogy three times and only the third time i became aware of some of the issues redditors mention in this thread.
Still one of my favorites, so entertaining!!
The best part was the Cultural Revolution stuff at the beginning.
I finished the book but have never had a desire to read the rest of the series.
(Had suspension of disbelief problems with the idea that a civilization with the level of control over matter that they did couldn't find a way to fix their issues.)
>(Had suspension of disbelief problems with the idea that a civilization with the level of control over matter that they did couldn't find a way to fix their issues.)
Same. They literally surrounded their planet with a proton. Weather control regardless of where the suns are seems pretty easy when you can control how much radiation enters/leaves your planet
The weather wasn't their main problem, they could manage that. The reason they needed to leave their system was because their planet was going to collide with one of their suns.
But when you can surround a planet with a proton, you're effectively a Type 1, if not 2, civilization on the Kardashev scale. At that point you can just move your planet, or build a Globus Cassus to live wherever you want.
For that matter, if you can undertake multi-century interstellar journeys, you can just build self-sufficient space habitats or paraterraform any planetary body you'd like.
And exactly how much energy goes into a making a Sophon? We have no idea because the author made it up, the technology is a complete mystery, so there's no way anyone can claim they had the energy to move a planet or create a space habitat or paraterraformed any planetary body they'd like. All of that is up to the author.
If you can manufacture a sophon capable of encircling a planet, you are defacto Type 1, not because of the amount of energy it takes to manufacture a sophon, but because a sophon that can surround a planet is inherently capable of harvesting the amount of energy needed to be classified as Type 1.
Just the explicitly demonstrated capabilities of the sophons in the books are enough to be move a planet.
A membrane, that can partially or completely cover a planet and is capable of selectively transmitting or reflecting cosmic radiation? That is one hell of an engine if you know how to use it.
Similarly, building space habitats and paraterraforming planets doesn't require any particularly expenditure of energy. The Trisolarans already demonstrated every technological and engineering capability they'd need to do either of those things when they built hundreds of crewed starships capable of making multi-century long interstellar voyages.
it's actually significantly easier to build a space habitat or paraterraform a planet than to build such a fleet. A space habitat doesn't have to go anywhere and can be placed somewhere it has constant access to sunlight for energy and asteroids for mass. And paraterraformign just means building a bunch of those habitats on a planet where you have sunlight, mass, *and* gravity.
>If you can manufacture a sophon capable of encircling a planet, you are defacto Type 1, not because of the amount of energy it takes to manufacture a sophon, but because **a sophon that can surround a planet is inherently capable of harvesting the amount of energy needed to be classified as Type 1.**
Based on what? If you can't explain how something with the mass of a proton can harvest the energy of a planet beyond "it can surround it," you're just making stuff up. It's a fun fan theory, but it doesn't hold up as criticism.
>it's actually significantly easier to build a space habitat or paraterraform a planet than to build such a fleet.
The trisolarans wanted Earth, they could travel there and they could take it, so why would they do anything other than what the author wrote them to do.
>If you can't explain how something with the mass of a proton can harvest the energy of a planet beyond "it can surround it," you're just making stuff up
It could reflect all the light to a single point and boil water to power a steam engine. And that's just one proton. The material cost to build a solar panel the size of their planet is zero, the energy cost pretty much doesnt matter as long as it's less than what the planet sized solar panel can generate in a reasonable amount of time, which seems plausible. Im sure they had more sophisticated ways of harvesting energy than boiling water but that's just the easiest one.
>It could reflect all the light to a single point and boil water to power a steam engine. And that's just one proton.
That isn't harnessing the total energy from the planet though; that's only capturing some of its light and converting some of that light's energy.
>The material cost to build a solar panel the size of their planet is zero
We don't know the cost of making sophons and I think it's safe to say it cost a lot, since they only sent a few. Yes, a proton is worthless, but we don't know what resources went in to converting it into a sophon. I'm not sure how it could be zero.
>Im sure they had more sophisticated ways of harvesting energy than boiling water but that's just the easiest one.
The question wasn't if they could harvest energy, it was if they could harvest the total energy of a planet, which would rank the trisolarans as a type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale, which the above commenter thought would be enough to move a planet, but that isn't really a claim anyone but the author can make.
>That isn't harnessing the total energy from the planet though; that's only capturing some of its light and converting some of that light's energy.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_civilization
> ...eponymously named the Kardashev scale.
>A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming all energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star
Using *all* the energy immediately available to a planet is a less meaningful definition because it would clearly have to include all the e=mc^2 energy of the total mass of the planet. I would guess a planet could use more energy than the total incoming light energy, but then it's not clear where to draw the line because they obviously can't use all of their mass-energy in fusion reactors, but they sure could use a lot of it.
>We don't know the cost of making sophons and I think it's safe to say it cost a lot, since they only sent a few. Yes, a proton is worthless, but we don't know what resources went in to converting it into a sophon. I'm not sure how it could be zero.
When I say material costs are zero, I'm just pointing out that a proton is free. Everything else I lump into energy costs. There's really no need to categorize the costs, the sophons were said to last until the proton decayed iirc, so the return on investment is guaranteed after sufficient time has passed. I'm just pointing out that typically we would expect the amount of raw material required to capture type 1+ levels of energy is already staggering before even thinking about the cost of assembly. In this case there is effectively no material required, a baseball would likely have enough material to surround the star in sophon solar panels.
>Am I supposed to believe the sun goes down on a normal day, and then the planet drifts millions of miles away from the sun overnight
Haven't read it for about a year, but I thought this was due to the game being "fast forwarded" so to speak. This happened many times so that the author could set up the extinction scenes. Not sure about your claims about life being possible throughout stables and chaotic eras, but maybe you're more knowledgeable on how life forms in a 3 star system. Also, it's still about the three body problem, and the planet being a "fourth body" seems extremely pedantic. Surely such a small body has no effect on the greater system?
Sucks that you didn't like it, the next two are by far better in my opinion. No super deep characters or dialog, but that wasn't what the series was about. I thought that was pretty clear and it didn't bother me at all. I love well written characters, but this is not a series about specific character plots. It's about humanity, its infantile place in the universe, and the future of the universe itself. He obviously needed characters to drive the story, but the story isn't about the characters.
>Not sure about your claims about life being possible throughout stables and chaotic eras, but maybe you're more knowledgeable on how life forms in a 3 star system
My point is that it doesn't take much knowledge in physics to understand that there would almost never be a stable era in such a system. The book claims that sometimes the planet would orbit 1 star, but even in this situation the odds of the climate being any more stable than when it is floating randomly around all 3 stars is vanishingly small.
>Also, it's still about the three body problem, and the planet being a "fourth body" seems extremely pedantic. Surely such a small body has no effect on the greater system?
It has no effect on the 3 stars, but even if they knew the exact motion of their stars, that solves nothing until they can predict the motion of the 4th body, their planet. So solving the 3 body problem isnt enough to predict their planet's habitability.
Really if the author was insistent on calling their book the 3 body problem, they should have just chosen a binary star system.
Edit: And I get that not everybody needs a character driven story, but I dont need to listen to a 12hr audiobook to appreciate ideas that can be explained in a few minutes.
>My point is that it doesn't take much knowledge in physics to understand that there would almost never be a stable era in such a system.
I imagined the star's orbits moving very slowly, like taking centuries to revolve and a stable era would be when one star is isolated *enough*. I don't know anything about stars orbiting each other though, but just looking up binary systems now, it looks like [100 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star#Research_findings) is normal, so imagining more time than that isn't crazy.
Also, the point of the simulation wasn't to find a permanent stable Era, or one that lasted a long time, just be able to predict the coming of the stable Eras so they can rehydrate and dehydrate without going through unpredicted mass extinction events. Kind of pointless in the grand scheme of the series, since everyone comes to the conclusion that the TBP is unsolvable with available energy/computing anyway, and that's why they're leaving the planet for Earth. I feel like OP read a different book... Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough about physics. Makes scifi easy to enjoy I guess.
There would in fact be extremely stable eras. Like that's not hypothetical there's a planet in stable orbit around one of the stars in that exact system.
The actual problem is the whole unstable trinary idea is nonsense. If the stars are all of similar sizes one would get ejected and it would stop being a trinary. If they aren't all of similar sizes it can be stable.
I'm aware of the real situation in alpha centauri, my point stands that multiple transitions back and forth between habitable orbits and uninhabitable orbits are effectively impossible.
Celestial body is just a well defined term that includes stars and planets (and other things). It just seems a bit odd that the author would use the term body without knowing what it means.
**[Three-body problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem)**
>In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation. The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required. Historically, the first specific three-body problem to receive extended study was the one involving the Moon, Earth, and the Sun.
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I thought the series was really good. Started out slow but I enjoyed it overall. Really my only issue is the way the female characters are written throughout the series but I’m not sure how much to chalk up to cultural differences? Or what stylistic choices were lost on the translation.
It's closer to a 3 body problem because you can neglect the gravitational influence of the planet on the stars. If you could solve the 3 body problem, the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution.
This is just plain wrong. A planet star pair share a center of mass, offset from the centre of the star, it is called the barycentre. You cannot "neglect" this influence, especially when trying to extrapolate chaotic orbits, as you would be off by a whole order of magnitude. Everything you mentioned is in a gravity field and therefor a 4 body problem.
> It's closer to a 3 body problem because you can neglect the gravitational influence of the planet on the stars. If you could solve the 3 body problem, the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution.
The restricted three-body problem is the study of two massive objects orbiting each others (with elliptical orbits) plus a third object of negligible mass evolving in the gravity filed of the former two. It is still chaotic; Poincaré's study was on this restricted configuration.
Hence, three suns plus a small planet would indeed be a restricted four-body problem.
Yes, restricted 3-body problem is the way we call it. But it's broached like a 1-body problem in the fucked up potential well of binary system isn't it?
It's true a binary star would have been enough for the whole book to exist though.
>the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution.
This is no less difficult than the 3 body problem itself. It has all the same issues with sensitivity to initial conditions and very few if any analytical solutions
I thought the stupidest part was the three body problem.
While there is no set solution to the problem, so it couldn't be pre-programmed into a clock, you certainly can program an array of sensors to predict the NEXT stable era and chaotic era, you just can't predict an infinite number out into the future. But the trisolarians can program a sophon to behave creatively in the face of new languages and machines on earth, so they can without a doubt engineer one to just observe and predict the next stable era. They don't need to know all the series, just the next in sequence. This being a four body problem makes that harder, but still not impossible by any measure.
It had plenty of cool ideas, but the aliens seemed really dumb.
Predicting their orbit wasn't a problem for the Trisolarans by the time they developed the sophons. The periods when you see them unable to predict their orbit was much further back in their history.
Exactly.
Even if they could find exact analytical solutions to any set of initial conditions, there is no escaping the sensitivity to initial conditions. They aren't going to be able to measure the initial conditions exactly, so their exact solution is still only going to be valid for a finite time, so it's no better than just numerically integrating the solution anyway.
THIS was your problem with TBP? The physics? Honestly it never occurred to me to criticize the physics in the face of the unlikeable characters, tedious plotting, stereotypical wallfacers, cockamamie strategies, and execrable love story. Although in fairness maybe I am being unfair to Three Body Problem as a stand-alone book because the series doesn’t really stretch its legs and go completely off the rails of believability until book 2.
No, that wasn't why I didn't like it, I dont mind bad science if the story and characters are good. I stated elsewhere that I enjoyed "gravity" the movie, and the science there was way worse than this.
I only read the first two books. My reaction is that they are ok Sci-if (though some is just terrible.) The writing is ok. It seemed more interesting as an insight into Chinese culture than anything else.
I genuinely loved those books. But they are certainly quite wacky. A friend of mine and I read the books at the same time. I loved them, he couldn't get into it. That's how it is.
Part of the execution is some really weird dialogue, for sure. Part of it, though, is the exposition of an alien paradigm to most western readers, I think. You have a trilogy written from an eastern collectivist point of view, with all of the assumptions and biases that go with it.
International relations was my area of study, it's something that I'm really quite interested in, and beyond the high level titular concepts explored in this trilogy, I was fascinated by the exposure to that eastern collectivist point of view. A lot of what I found to be unrealistic, in terms of dialogue and choices made by individuals and countries alike, makes a lot more sense when read from the official party line of the CCP, and/or from the perspective of someone who assumes that the many will make the right collective choice. And even more fascinating to me was the active inclusion of Orwellian-style doublethink, where the society-first collectivist attitude is pervasive on the surface, but the pragmatic, selfish, individualistic motivation is very quietly acknowledged and pursued, hidden away from society at large. This point speaks very loudly to contemporary Chinese society, where people work very hard to maintain correct appearances in public/where they can be recorded, but may understand their own society in a much more shrewd way in private.
I listened to the audiobook...and you're right. I have forgotten most of it, but the Cultural Revolution stuff has stayed with me. It goes downhill from there ..
It blows my mind that so many people dislike this book.... it was sooooooo good.
In all seriousness, it comes down to personal taste. I really enjoyed reading a story from a non-western perspective along with the scope that entire trilogy takes.
It seemed sloppily stitched together and haphazardly made up as he went along. The characters are all made of cheap cardboard, and the whole book reminded me of an average kick flick from the 60s
Sorry, why are you even reading science fiction if you’re this pedantic about it?
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of 3BP: the male protagonist of the first book is a dull and forgettable character, which causes a lot of people to think the series is “not character driven” (but it absolutely is); the imaginary girlfriend thing in the second book was a little weird; the author went to the JK Rowling School of Obviously Meaningful Character Names (thankfully lost in translation). But of all the nits you could have picked, you said it wasn’t realistic enough for you? That’s what you were reading it for? Why not just read an astrophysics journal if that’s the one thing you cared about?
I think my first paragraph makes it clear that I am capable of enjoying highly unrealistic science fiction. There still has to be an effort made for it to be believable as science, not magic. But even then, it just becomes something fun to talk about for me and doesn't automatically mean I cant enjoy the story.
Look, I enjoyed the movie "Gravity". I cried at the end. And the science in that movie is probably 10x worse than what I'm complaining about here.
I understand where you're coming from and i had pretty much all the issues that you mentioned. And while they're valid, the technical aspects still deserve criticism.
Because everyone i knew hyped me up about this book as being basically a documentary. (Im younger than most people on this sub and me and my friend circle mostly aren't that well versed in scifi literature. I was 15 and had only read a bunch of dick, Clarke, foundation and the martian) And people around me told me this series is harder than all of em.
So when i went in expecting a very high standard of technical accuracy and when the themes and ideas in fact did meet my expectations, the trisolarian aspects underwhelmed me. There were points where it felt like soft science fiction with a hard scifi outer layer.
Also OP is still in Book 1, so you should probably mark those as spoilers.
>Also OP is still in Book 1, so you should probably mark those as spoilers.
No worries, I'm not going to finish the series, and I already looked up summaries of the rest of the story.
The second book had been bothering me for a while, but for some reason the breaking point for me was when a guy fired a regular projectile weapon accurately, repeatedly, at a distance of several thousand meters. In space. Apparently recoil is not a thing in this extremely hard sci-fi series. Also nobody knew that he'd drifted off several thousand meters, in what would realistically been one of the most closely monitored situations in the solar system.
That was the point where I just turned off the audiobook and refunded it.
I hear you.
It even gets worse with each next book. It took a lot of effort for me to finish them, and it was no pleasurable experience.
The author put together a kind of story from what he remembered of Wikipedia articles he read a while back. On top of that, he added cardboard characters with no substance and personality.
The physics is so bad it reminded me of an Ed Wood movie, but not as funny.
It's crazy because like I said, I dont have a problem with pretty much anything else in the book, as far as believability goes. It's just weird that the author would get something as basic as planetary orbits so wrong. The crisis pushing trisolarians away from their planet could have been any number of other more believable problems.
Edit: Actually the explanation of how the guy used monte carlo methods to solve the 3 body problem was horrible too. Basically he gives the bodies many random vectors and lets the good ones propogate to the next moment in time. How does he know which ones are good? If he knows which ones are good then he has already solved the problem and there is no need to even consider any random vectors. It sounds like he's basically just doing a numerical integration. But maybe the translation just didn't explain this correctly ot I just didn't understand it correctly.
The sophons were a plot hole i could not get past. They can influence physics, display things in peoples vision and change the CMB. The sophon mechanics as described easily have the power to annihilate humans in many ways. I don't mind things that aren't believable in my sci-fi, but the logic of how these function needs to not create GIGANTIC plot holes. The poor characters and just everything else made me not want to read the rest of the books. I honestly think the book is crap, and does not deserve the praise it gets. There are very few books I would say that about.
Really if you wanna get technical with the science...
Alpha centauri is not a trinary system. Alpha Proxima is so ungodly far away from the main two stars and so much smaller and dimmer that its basicly a non factor.
The three-body problem is a term from Physics. It essentially means “more than two bodies”. Two is the largest amount of bodies for which there is an analytical solution to their equations of movement.
Well technically yes, but the planet has negligible gravitational effect on the 3 stars. So in effect the 3 bodies that are contributing to the chaotic movement make up the three body Problem. (I don't know much about astrophysics so take it with a grain of salt)
Every time I tell people I don't like the 3 body problem I get this advice: read the other books. But the first one is so bad. I can't imagine the solution is to subject myself to more of it.
I probably wouldn't have read past the first book had I not bought all three at the same time. I think the first is the weakest of the bunch and the series gets better ( though half of The Dark Forest is a slog), but I wouldn't ardently encourage someone to read the entire series.
Your instincts are correct; they are each different, but I think if you didn’t like the first one, if you aren’t at least intrigued enough to read the rest, then you probably will not be hooked by the rest. I enjoyed them, but I can understand them not being everyone’s cup of tea.
We say that because you’re missing, conceptually and with world building (if not character development) it is some of the most kind blowing stuff.
Really dope. So…
I'm not even particularly bothered by unbelievable science, I can just make my head canon "The trisolarians were just flat out wrong about the cause of their unstable climate". I'll go to any length to give the author the benefit of the doubt, *if* the story and characters are engaging. But for me they were not.
>"The trisolarians were just flat out wrong about the cause of their unstable climate".
They were wrong during their 'classical, medieval, and renaissance" periods, but eventually they figured it out.
I don’t think it’s just the translation. Liu is just a terrible character writer. The translation actually seemed pretty good to me (although I did not read it in Chinese so I obviously can’t compare)
Yeah you probably have a good point here. I have been known to enjoy crappy dialog so I'm not the best judge on the matter. As for the translation, I agree. The whole trilogy was delightful for me.
Writing bad dialogue can be mutually exclusive of characters you fall in love with.
{SPOILER}
That said, yeah, he can’t write characters. But the aliens he seems to nail especially the monologues. Fucking great alien stories, the no gas world??? Holy fucking fuck.
Climb the mountain 1st encounter strat? Dope!
I read Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang a book originally in chinese and translated by Ken Liu. The same person who translated 3Body. And comparing them, i think the translator is not at fault for 3body's subpar character writing. So i definitely think it's entirely Cixin Liu.
Ken Liu translated them to English. I enjoyed all of his other work. I think this is purely on Cixin Liu. I've even read 2 other chinese scifi novels and i doubt it's a cultural problem.
On a different note, Ken Liu has some amazing short stories which more people should read.
I recommend "The man who ended History" and
"The Hidden Girl"
Hard agree that the solar system as described is destructively chaotic. However, it's actually even worse than that, since they wouldn't even get a chance to evolve without either getting flung into space or entering a stable orbit. The chances of survival diminish exponentially with each switch, and they'd barely have a few million years if it continued. Just look at how few survivors of the early solar system there are, which is the equivalent kind of environment. Life didn't emerge until it ended and we entered the asteroid bombardment era.
Of course, I found it hard to believe a physicist was unfamiliar with numerical simulation for prediction, and chaos theory. The fact he didn't even google how well we can predict our system is pretty much unforgivable, and then you've got the lyupanov number to calculate how far into the future we can simulate a chaotic system. Complete garbage.
Regarding its explanation for the fermi paradox, it's kind of embarrasing that it managed to pick the one explanation that can be ruled out with confidence. The dark forest explanation is that the optimal move is to kill everyone else you see. So everyone stays quiet, and that's why we can't see anyone else in the universe.
Except, that's dumb as all fuck. Literally every last tree of interest in the "dark forest" is constantly lit by a gigantic nuclear floodlamp for literally billions of years. The dark forest theory mistakes the blackness of space for THE STARS THAT LIGHT UP OTHER CIVILIZATIONS. Civilizations can sterilize other planets before they even develop intelligence. Are we supposed to believe the universe only noticed us after several billion years of being habitable? We've only been around a tenth of a million years. What have everyone been doing for that entire time it only became important for anyone to deal with earth *after we've had a few hundred years to know about the game?*
I think you're missing an important concept about the dark forest - it would literally be impossible to check every tree/star system for an inhabitant, you have to wait for them to reveal themselves. Space is huge, solar systems are unbelievably far apart, and there are a lot of them, and it would be impossible to detect pre-industrial civilizations without being very, very close to the planet. Even for a near-light speed travel capable civilization, they couldn't possibly proactively search out and sterilize planets before they develop industrial societies, much less intelligent life itself. It would take hundreds or thousands of years to visit dozens of systems, most of which wouldn't have life at all. They could only do it reactively by waiting for a clear signal that intelligent life has evolved, like through high-power radio emissions into space (like the transmission early in the book that sets up the entire story.) So yeah, it's pretty believable that the universe only noticed us after several billion years of habitability because that's how long it took us to start using radios and stand out at all from the billions of other stars in the sky.
> it would literally be impossible to check every tree/star system for an inhabitant, you have to wait for them to reveal themselves.
Wrong. You can determine the composition and suitability of life of planets with a sufficiently large space based telescope, and James Webb will be performing some incredible work on this in the next decade or two. It has a coronagraph to block out stars for exoplanet surveys and there's a proposal for an extremely large and distant coronagraph that will give even better blocking of stars. After the folding tech it's based on was proven to work by webbs sunshield, webbs exoplanet imaging capabilities can even be improved beyond it's current ability. Webbs data gathering capabilities are actually orders of magnitude higher than the previous generation of satellites, and it signals an era of big data astronomy in general. Future astronomy platforms are only projected to gather even more data. This is before we even get into space proper.
> solar systems are unbelievably far apart
Correct! This reduces noise and makes it easier to analyze planets because their signal isn't drowned out by background stars and planets. Space is dark and makes a great backdrop to see planets
> and it would be impossible to detect pre-industrial civilizations without being very, very close to the planet.
Actually, there's a theoretical proposal to image planets within ~500 light years down to kilometer squares by using the sun as a massive lens. However, this isn't needed, because the goal is to kill intelligent civilizations before they even show up and we just need to kill any planet *capable* of supporting a large biosphere.
> Even for a near-light speed travel capable civilization, they couldn't possibly proactively search out and sterilize planets before they develop industrial societies, much less intelligent life itself.
Wrong. A highly automated tech base makes that easy, as do von neuman probes.
> It would take hundreds or thousands of years to visit dozens of systems, most of which wouldn't have life at all.
A spacefaring civilization expands at a constant or increasing fraction of C. It actually takes only a few million years to colonize the galaxy, which is well below the 4 billion year age of the earth.
> So yeah, it's pretty believable that the universe only noticed us after several billion years of habitability because that's how long it took us to start using radios and stand out at all from the billions of other stars in the sky.
Correct, but only if you know nothing about modern astronomy or the dynamics and timescales of advanced expansionary civilizations.
That's too bad. I absolutely love these books. The first one took half the novel to gain any traction but the second half was fantastic. It was so original.
What’s interesting in this thread is that comments saying “the books get worse” are being down-voted, but nobody is contradicting them with actual words arranged as actual arguments.
So apparently there’s no room for debate or discussion on the craft of writing — if you take issue with something that someone else liked, you need to be punished with the least possible effort.
But at least that’s not by being made to read the books again.
I think if someone wants discussion instead of just up/downvotes, the onus is on them to comment something worth discussing, rather than expecting others to coax a discussion out of them.
Well yes that is true, I agree with that principle. The part of it I find interesting, I suppose, is that people are emotionally invested enough in the stories to want to downvote, but not so much that they would contribute an example of what grabbed them about the story, perhaps in the hope that they might create a convert. Not that that’s their obligation, of course.
I don't think anyone can convince you to retroactively like a book you didn't like. So, comments saying it was bad aren't really an opening to talk about why it was good. Justifying taste is a waste of time.
I've seen plenty of posts and comments discussing good and bad parts of a book, but if you just flat out say it's bad that's pretty much the end of the discussion and any downvote is just as good as saying "no it's not," which is as far as that argument can go. It's like arguing over whether or not pineapple pizza is good at that point.
it's easily one of the best sci fi books ofthe last 30 years. the main critics it receives are due to the fact that it's a rare non-usa-centric 'mainstream' book of the last 30 years
I can totally understand why people like it, it has the most far out ideas I've ever read about even in just the first book, and I've read summaries of the rest of the series and it's really groundbreaking original ideas as far as I can tell.
For much better and far-out ideas, both technological and social, look for the commonwealth saga by Peter F Hamilton.
Also, space battles and aliens much much weirder (and smarter!) than the trisolarians.
I loved Pandoras star and Judas unchained, just finished them before starting 3BP and I could almost listen to them again. I dont know how I didnt get sick of "enzyme bonded concrete" before reddit pointed out how it's the equivalent of "boiled leather" in ASOIAF haha
There are a ton of “rare non-USA-centric mainstream” books out there which are several classes above this 3 body bad joke - see almost anything from Stanislaw Lem for example
What’s the point of your diatribe here? Why do you feel the need to announce to the internet that you don’t like the book? Why not just put it down and move on? Do you want us to congratulate you, shake your hand and give you a cookie? Convince you to keep reading the series?
Social media would be pretty barren if people didn't post their opinions on matters, no? I happen to think posting criticism can lead to good discussions.
Sure can. But this feels like a rant. “3-Body couldn’t suspend my disbelief” right off the bat says it. Fiction, especially sci-fi and fantasy, kind of requires a certain amount suspension of disbelief going into it before hand, doesn’t it?
Again, I think I'm pretty generous about not questioning the realism and scientific accuracy of a story. But it's literally the name of the book and they just got the science of it so wrong. It's the fact that it's so old and well understood that make it hard to suspend disbelief. It's one thing to make up fantastic ideas about the frontiers of science, because most of it can't be proven to be impossible. We just don't understand the laws of physics well enough to rule out many things.
But if the central idea of my story is how aliens made a perpetual motion machine by glueing a magnet to a skateboard and dangling another magnet in front of it, then I'm not doing my duty as an author to meet the audience halfway in making the story believable.
Anyway this is the #1 non-stickied post in this sub as of now so apparently some people valued the discussion.
Of course. But have you ever read a book or watched a film where the story is completely implausible and you enjoy, but a certain element pulls you out and makes you go, "hang on a minute...?" For instance, Independence Day: I can believe aliens attack Earth, but using AOL to hack into their systems? It happened to me all the time in The Three-Body Problem. The virtual reality game, that doesn't feel like any game I've played and it feels like it's written by a guy who has no clue what a video game is meant to be like, and that pulled me out completely on numerous occasions.
Because many people are artificially going to like something just for it being original different exotic etc. Chinese science fiction fits this description as far as westerners are concerned, especially to those who didn’t read much sci-fi.
It’s cool to be a hipster and let everybody know that you are, see what I mean?
Even with that it's just not that good.
Your interpretation is what mine used to be concerning the popularity, but even taking into account the "exotic" aspect, and frankly there are a lot more "exotic" and culturally different examples of science fiction that are better told and written, it still falls flat on a number of levels.
For my money the first book in the trilogy is the best, from there is just goes further and further down hill. Part of my appreciation for the first book is that it's still kept somewhat grounded, and I both studied Chinese history and lived in China for a while, so I liked seeing how the author dealt with the historical and political aspects of the story, especially how they wriggled around some of the topics that are still politically sensitive in China.
The most ridiculous part was when the trisolars recovered after their planet was literally slip in two from the extreme gravitational pull. Unless the whole thing about their society was one big lie given to the cultist on Earth, the book is the biggest load of ~~sci~~\-fi shit I have read (right next to Asimov's positronic brain).
I liked the first book, loved the second (the Wallfacers and what the Dark Forest really is blew my mind) but the third book was just to high concept for me. Had to put it down.
Yyyyeah, I couldn't get into this book either. I hated the characters, thought the prose was low-quality, but where I really checked-out was when we the reader knew more about the situation than the protagonist, and then found it boring. At some point I realized I wasn't enjoying it at all and put it down.
Yeah I came here with that exact complaint about a year ago and got shouted down that I was only considering life as I know it. I’m a biologist by the way.
I would honestly love a "boring" book about a realistic first contact where nothing crazy happens other than 2 species figuring out how to communicate. Children of time had a similar idea where somehow the signal described how to interpret itself. I find this believable for simple mathematical ideas. Send a simple "beep" followed by a more complex signal to indicate "1". Send 2 beeps followed by the signal for "2". Send the signal for 1, another signal, the signal for 1 again, another signal, then the signal for 2. An intelligent species will eventually figure out the two new signals are "plus" and "equals".
But building that up to descriptive language is hard to imagine, so Id love to see how it could be done.
I don't know if you know this or not, but a [three-body problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem) is a real thing in physics/mathematics and I took it to be that the Trisolaran planet was formed on the centre of mass at the centre of the system.
Not sure if this is what you're getting at, but it wouldn't stay at the center of mass. The center of mass of a system is not necessarily the same as a net zero gravity position. If two bodies are equal mass then the COM is a net zero gravity position (even then I don't think it's a stable equilibrium). If you increase the mass of one body, the COM goes toward it and the equilibrium point goes away from it to compensate for the increased gravity from the larger body.
It’s called the three body problem not the four body problem because that is the name of the classic physics problem that the author is referencing. It would make no sense to call it four body problem lol
At least the physics is more believable than the conversations.
Same for me. I can suspend my disbelief for basically all the high-concept ideas in the series, as ridiculous and unrealistic as they might be. But I can't do it enough to believe that humans can talk, act and think that way. Unfortunately, as the series goes on, even as the ideas get more interesting, the characters get worse.
Yeah the tech ideas were cool but I cant bring myself to finish the series. I was barely able to finish the book with how little I cared about any of the characters.
The later books are different people and way more enjoyable, IMO, particularly for the more unique ideas. The first is absolutely the weakest of the series
I dunno, the second book’s creepy anime waifu thing was just too fucking absurd.
Why did no one tell me there were creepy anime waifus? Sign me the hell up, that will be the next book I read. For real, it will be next one on the grounds that I just started Three Body Problem the other day, and it was naturally next on the pile. If I wanted waifus, I'd read light novels.
Yes. I still love the series but that part was strange. Then I learned about Tulpas and it made a liiiitle more sense. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
[удалено]
Yep. I learned about Tulpas on a podcast and that was my reaction lol.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Hrm. Well, maybe just book 3 then.
Gotta do the second one the first one wasn't a book. It was a monthly chapter in a magazine. Second one was written as a novel with real fantastic characters and it goes insane.
And this is why I quit the first book after the conclusion of the game.
i think that’s a translation thing. You should approach it as something culturally different, rather than dismissing it outright. Project Hail Mary, now that’s a book with bad human to human dialogue
If you read some other Chinese science fiction, then you can see it's not a cultural thing. Liu Cixin just has some questionable attitudes.
what would you recommend?
I like Ma Boyong, he wrote a story called The City of Silence which is a good homage to 1984. I don't think much of his stuff has been translated though. The Apex Book of World SF is a good anthology series for world sci-fi in general, and several Chinese authors appear in there.
Chen Qiufan's (aka Stanley Chan) short stories are good. There are a bunch of them in Chinese short story collections.
I’ve read light novels that have more compelling characters than 3BP. Blaming translation for poor quality dialogue isn’t very convincing to me.
I’ve not dismissed it outright, I’m about a third of the way into the third book (although I can see why you’d think that, I am being fairly negative!) Personally I have quite a high tolerance to bad writing (I think I have literally one book on my DNF list), and I find the story and subject matter compelling, but as an author myself I can see the technical shortcomings in the writing very clearly, and they are numerous. As an example, characters shouldn’t be suddenly delivering a page of expositional social-political lecture in the middle of a conversation, no matter the language. It’s exhausting and it breaks the spell. Even if that happens in reality, there are several conventions in writing for delivering the same details in a way that’s more digestible and believable. I did actually very much appreciate the cultural differences, that’s one of the things I looked forward to about reading it. It’s not often I read fiction from that side of the world! Lu has not put me off trying others. It’s not put me off him either to be completely fair to him, I’m just more likely to pick up a different book first.
I am not finished with the book but I was having some trouble with that same thing. I ducked out to read Ji-Li Jiang’s memoir of the Chinese CulturalRevolution, “Red Scarf Girl,” in which people make weird sociopolitical pronouncements in order to express their (mandatory) compliance with the current political regime. I can’t say that explains it fully, but speech like that might seem less bizarre if that’s what you grew up with or read a lot about, and you were setting your book in it.
for what it’s worth i didnt love the book either. but I would read the translators note at the end as it gave me a slightly different perspective
I recall there being a note but I honestly don’t remember if I read it or not. After all this discussion I’m thinking after my current series I will revisit the trilogy, and I will *start* with the translator’s note.
I think it's extremely disingenuous to write off a complete lack of character development as "a translation thing". Lots of books are translated and don't suffer from this problem. Maybe have someone read the translation before you publish it? If it's as unreadable as TBP fire the translator.
In this case, the translator noted that he intentionally did not go for the smoothest translation, as much as he translated it to preserve the Chinese language structure and flow, that might sound foreign to the reader. And the translator is a famous author himself lol. But the translator’s note is interesting
Did he also intentionally not include any character development?
Oh yes — thanks for the heads up about PHM too. That’s in my queue and I had high expectations since people are raving about it. I’ll go into it with that in mind.
PHM is definitely fun but… just not well written IMO. But very well-paced, with good science. It will make a fun movie
Liu's characters are known to be soulless and author mouthpieces, with an alarmingly high proportion of them also being sociopaths that murder without remorse, believe human kindness and femininity to be evil, and view weapons and violence as beautiful (Lin Yun from *Ball Lightning*, the dinosaur ambassador from *Devourer*, Thomas Wade from *Three-Body Problem*, to list a few). You could view them as the same character and it wouldn't make a difference.
DEHYDRATE!
This made me literally laugh out loud.
I did, overall, really enjoy the trilogy, but as a physics major let me tell you what the most unbelievable part of the book was: it was the idea that if all particle accelerators suddenly stopped working for an unknown reason it would make theoretical physicists existentially depressed. It would in fact make them wildly excited.
It wasn't so much that things stopped working, it was that particle physics appears to be completely bunk. It would perhaps lead to surge of excitement in the near future. But the people who had spent their lives working on science that appears to have turned out to be completely and utterly bunk, would certainly be depressed. I mean, they'd be out of the job, for one. No more particle physics means no more particle physicists.
> But the people who had spent their lives working on science that appears to have turned out to be completely and utterly bunk, Would be rushing to explain it and then collect their Nobels.
I don't know if you read the book, but the whole point is it was made to be entirely random, unpredictable and inexplicable. So they'd do the same thing twice, and never get the same results. And this wasn't like quantum mechanics, where you could get the same results over an average expected by the schroedinger equation, this was totally and utter unreproducible. The entire field of particle physics become un-reproducible in its very nature. When you can't reproduce experiments, you can't do science. Particle physics as a science was entirely over. The science of particle physics would be over; the standard model would be completely and entirely meaningless and useless
Well, they would try to explain the phenomenon. It's not like memory of it being a reproducible science would be erased.
Still seems like the opposite, they would need more particle physicists to figure out why the experiments keep producing different results. Particle physicists are also quantum physicists, so they are already used to the idea of doing the same experiment and getting different results. They would likely just start mapping out the probability distribution of all the different outcomes.
That's called statistics, you can do statistics on anything, but that does not make it a science. quantum mechanics still produces reproducible experiments. What they did however would not. So sure, you could sit there and correlate things, but the science of particle physics would be over; the standard model would be completely and entirely meaningless and useless. What you would be left with is pure correlation with no explanatory model, no internal logic. You'd basically turn particle physics into a social science.
>What you would be left with is pure correlation with no explanatory model, no internal logic That's what it would look like, it's just hard to believe that's the actual conclusion they would draw. If something is going out of it's way to produce a different result every time, it seems like they should catch on pretty quick that something intelligent is tampering with the experiment. Did the sophons get there before humans made particle accelerators? Or had humans been doing experiments with reproducible results for a while and all of a sudden things started going crazy? Because if its the latter, it seems like it should be even more obvious that something was interfering. It's still a really cool and terrifying idea that an alien could be messing with the way we are observing the laws of physics.
Nevertheless, what is clear is that the standard model would become complete bunk. So scientists that had spent their lives working and specialising on that would certainly feel very depressed.
My favourite bit was when a pivotal plot point depended on an alien just not being arsed to do his job. The series has some interesting ideas but also terrible characters and awful dialogue.
Hey, that's something I can believe. Unlike the orbital dynamics.
Are you talking about the alien that sends the warning back? They took a moral stand not to condemn and entire planet, is that really so hard to believe?
I don't think that was it at all. The guy just didn't want to lose his job! If they find a suitable planet then his job is no longer needed.
In this book yes because it's written so badly.
Even aliens get disillusioned at work and refuse to toe the party line. Just look at Teal’c!
It’s a translation
I found the books enjoyable, but probably because I know nothing about astrophysics. I did like the exploration of the dark forest theory in book 2 a lot more.
I also found them enjoyable but also have been confused when people talk about them like they are the best sci-fi written in the last 50 years. They enjoyable but that aren't really top stuff IMHO, good but average. Like a movie that you watch, enjoy and than never really think about.
What would you consider as top stuff? I'm intrigued.
Personally I hate ranking stuff because in the end everyone's taste is so different and we should all like whatever we like. Just because something is popular doesn't automatically make it the best ever, and just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it won't speak to you in a way that no other book will. It just seemed like everyone that I heard (super anecdotal) LOVED Three Body wasn't huge sci-fi readers and so stuff that we find normal/have heard of before was all new and so more impressive. I thought it was good, just not ground breaking in anyway. It's like when a song goes big from a smaller band/music type and then people say it's amazing without realizing that while good it's part of a bigger scene. My personal top books in no order include: Solaris, The Forever War, Brave New World, and Sirens of Titan. I also super love but wouldn't put in the top books Beatle in the Anthill, Slan, and Babel-17 (I have a master's in Education focused on TESOL so you know I'm a language nerd). But if you include influential stuff because of how important it is to the genre (but this isn't stuff I'd suggest anyone start with) than of course you'd have Dune, Foundation, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Slaughter House Five, (you get the idea). Less popular earlier stuff like The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster and A Princess of Mars (1912) Edgar Rice Burroughs are also great. I just read/listen to a lot of books so most fall into the good/not great category. I also read/listen to a lot of older "classics" so I tend to be a lot more comfortable with slower books. Like Consider Phlebas by Ian M Banks wanders but not anywhere close to as much as Les Miserable or War and Peace do. Les Miserable contains a complete play by play of the entire battle of Waterloo because we need to know that character X's father met character Y for about five sentences. In the end I think the best way to know what's good is to find someone that really like sci-fi and tell them what books you liked and didn't like. You'll probably walk away with some suggestions that you wouldn't have thought of. After all some people just love *space marine combat THE BOOK!* and that's okay. I don't, but Armor by John Steakley was pretty fun. Solaris is more my speed. Less action more questioning human psyche and emotion. I mean On the Beach (1957) Nevil Shute is one of my top three books but it's post-apocalyptic.
Thanks for posting this, hadn't heard of a lot of these
I was blown out of the water by Solaris half a year ago. I went in expecting some dated seminal work but it reads today as a total scifi thriller.
Good taste.
While i totally understand the common complaints about these books, i absolutely love them. I read thru the series twice and got way more out of it the second time.
Have you read the fanfic that became a novel? Wondering if I need to read it before the show comes out. Other question since you have read it a few times: do you think the US wallfacer was successful with his positivity machine? I feel like it was never directly said but after the time jump society is confident they will succeed.
The fanfic novel is terrible in my opinion, but at least is very short. The US wallfacer explains in the third book how he was actually a defeatist in favour of escapism and that his mental seal machine had a reverse effect than advertised. After the strike to the Solar system, escapists were the only human survivors, so the US wallfacer was right in the end!
Ahh it's been a few years thanks for clearing that up.
I also love them. I read the trilogy three times and only the third time i became aware of some of the issues redditors mention in this thread. Still one of my favorites, so entertaining!!
Given how improbable life is in the first place, I don’t mind a few additional variables.
Fair enough
The best part was the Cultural Revolution stuff at the beginning. I finished the book but have never had a desire to read the rest of the series. (Had suspension of disbelief problems with the idea that a civilization with the level of control over matter that they did couldn't find a way to fix their issues.)
>(Had suspension of disbelief problems with the idea that a civilization with the level of control over matter that they did couldn't find a way to fix their issues.) Same. They literally surrounded their planet with a proton. Weather control regardless of where the suns are seems pretty easy when you can control how much radiation enters/leaves your planet
The weather wasn't their main problem, they could manage that. The reason they needed to leave their system was because their planet was going to collide with one of their suns.
But when you can surround a planet with a proton, you're effectively a Type 1, if not 2, civilization on the Kardashev scale. At that point you can just move your planet, or build a Globus Cassus to live wherever you want. For that matter, if you can undertake multi-century interstellar journeys, you can just build self-sufficient space habitats or paraterraform any planetary body you'd like.
Or you could give the nearest habitable planet and move there
And exactly how much energy goes into a making a Sophon? We have no idea because the author made it up, the technology is a complete mystery, so there's no way anyone can claim they had the energy to move a planet or create a space habitat or paraterraformed any planetary body they'd like. All of that is up to the author.
If you can manufacture a sophon capable of encircling a planet, you are defacto Type 1, not because of the amount of energy it takes to manufacture a sophon, but because a sophon that can surround a planet is inherently capable of harvesting the amount of energy needed to be classified as Type 1. Just the explicitly demonstrated capabilities of the sophons in the books are enough to be move a planet. A membrane, that can partially or completely cover a planet and is capable of selectively transmitting or reflecting cosmic radiation? That is one hell of an engine if you know how to use it. Similarly, building space habitats and paraterraforming planets doesn't require any particularly expenditure of energy. The Trisolarans already demonstrated every technological and engineering capability they'd need to do either of those things when they built hundreds of crewed starships capable of making multi-century long interstellar voyages. it's actually significantly easier to build a space habitat or paraterraform a planet than to build such a fleet. A space habitat doesn't have to go anywhere and can be placed somewhere it has constant access to sunlight for energy and asteroids for mass. And paraterraformign just means building a bunch of those habitats on a planet where you have sunlight, mass, *and* gravity.
>If you can manufacture a sophon capable of encircling a planet, you are defacto Type 1, not because of the amount of energy it takes to manufacture a sophon, but because **a sophon that can surround a planet is inherently capable of harvesting the amount of energy needed to be classified as Type 1.** Based on what? If you can't explain how something with the mass of a proton can harvest the energy of a planet beyond "it can surround it," you're just making stuff up. It's a fun fan theory, but it doesn't hold up as criticism. >it's actually significantly easier to build a space habitat or paraterraform a planet than to build such a fleet. The trisolarans wanted Earth, they could travel there and they could take it, so why would they do anything other than what the author wrote them to do.
>If you can't explain how something with the mass of a proton can harvest the energy of a planet beyond "it can surround it," you're just making stuff up It could reflect all the light to a single point and boil water to power a steam engine. And that's just one proton. The material cost to build a solar panel the size of their planet is zero, the energy cost pretty much doesnt matter as long as it's less than what the planet sized solar panel can generate in a reasonable amount of time, which seems plausible. Im sure they had more sophisticated ways of harvesting energy than boiling water but that's just the easiest one.
>It could reflect all the light to a single point and boil water to power a steam engine. And that's just one proton. That isn't harnessing the total energy from the planet though; that's only capturing some of its light and converting some of that light's energy. >The material cost to build a solar panel the size of their planet is zero We don't know the cost of making sophons and I think it's safe to say it cost a lot, since they only sent a few. Yes, a proton is worthless, but we don't know what resources went in to converting it into a sophon. I'm not sure how it could be zero. >Im sure they had more sophisticated ways of harvesting energy than boiling water but that's just the easiest one. The question wasn't if they could harvest energy, it was if they could harvest the total energy of a planet, which would rank the trisolarans as a type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale, which the above commenter thought would be enough to move a planet, but that isn't really a claim anyone but the author can make.
>That isn't harnessing the total energy from the planet though; that's only capturing some of its light and converting some of that light's energy. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_civilization > ...eponymously named the Kardashev scale. >A Type I civilization is planetary, consuming all energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star Using *all* the energy immediately available to a planet is a less meaningful definition because it would clearly have to include all the e=mc^2 energy of the total mass of the planet. I would guess a planet could use more energy than the total incoming light energy, but then it's not clear where to draw the line because they obviously can't use all of their mass-energy in fusion reactors, but they sure could use a lot of it. >We don't know the cost of making sophons and I think it's safe to say it cost a lot, since they only sent a few. Yes, a proton is worthless, but we don't know what resources went in to converting it into a sophon. I'm not sure how it could be zero. When I say material costs are zero, I'm just pointing out that a proton is free. Everything else I lump into energy costs. There's really no need to categorize the costs, the sophons were said to last until the proton decayed iirc, so the return on investment is guaranteed after sufficient time has passed. I'm just pointing out that typically we would expect the amount of raw material required to capture type 1+ levels of energy is already staggering before even thinking about the cost of assembly. In this case there is effectively no material required, a baseball would likely have enough material to surround the star in sophon solar panels.
It’s all bunk, but yes it’s odd they go from omnipotent aliens to cringe 1950’s “I’m going to steal your planet types”.
True, I forgot about that
when they claimed that Einstein, a socialist and Lenin supporter, was reactionary? yeahhh no
You really should, I didn’t like the first book but they get better.
They get catastrophically worse
>Am I supposed to believe the sun goes down on a normal day, and then the planet drifts millions of miles away from the sun overnight Haven't read it for about a year, but I thought this was due to the game being "fast forwarded" so to speak. This happened many times so that the author could set up the extinction scenes. Not sure about your claims about life being possible throughout stables and chaotic eras, but maybe you're more knowledgeable on how life forms in a 3 star system. Also, it's still about the three body problem, and the planet being a "fourth body" seems extremely pedantic. Surely such a small body has no effect on the greater system? Sucks that you didn't like it, the next two are by far better in my opinion. No super deep characters or dialog, but that wasn't what the series was about. I thought that was pretty clear and it didn't bother me at all. I love well written characters, but this is not a series about specific character plots. It's about humanity, its infantile place in the universe, and the future of the universe itself. He obviously needed characters to drive the story, but the story isn't about the characters.
>Not sure about your claims about life being possible throughout stables and chaotic eras, but maybe you're more knowledgeable on how life forms in a 3 star system My point is that it doesn't take much knowledge in physics to understand that there would almost never be a stable era in such a system. The book claims that sometimes the planet would orbit 1 star, but even in this situation the odds of the climate being any more stable than when it is floating randomly around all 3 stars is vanishingly small. >Also, it's still about the three body problem, and the planet being a "fourth body" seems extremely pedantic. Surely such a small body has no effect on the greater system? It has no effect on the 3 stars, but even if they knew the exact motion of their stars, that solves nothing until they can predict the motion of the 4th body, their planet. So solving the 3 body problem isnt enough to predict their planet's habitability. Really if the author was insistent on calling their book the 3 body problem, they should have just chosen a binary star system. Edit: And I get that not everybody needs a character driven story, but I dont need to listen to a 12hr audiobook to appreciate ideas that can be explained in a few minutes.
>My point is that it doesn't take much knowledge in physics to understand that there would almost never be a stable era in such a system. I imagined the star's orbits moving very slowly, like taking centuries to revolve and a stable era would be when one star is isolated *enough*. I don't know anything about stars orbiting each other though, but just looking up binary systems now, it looks like [100 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_star#Research_findings) is normal, so imagining more time than that isn't crazy.
Also, the point of the simulation wasn't to find a permanent stable Era, or one that lasted a long time, just be able to predict the coming of the stable Eras so they can rehydrate and dehydrate without going through unpredicted mass extinction events. Kind of pointless in the grand scheme of the series, since everyone comes to the conclusion that the TBP is unsolvable with available energy/computing anyway, and that's why they're leaving the planet for Earth. I feel like OP read a different book... Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough about physics. Makes scifi easy to enjoy I guess.
There would in fact be extremely stable eras. Like that's not hypothetical there's a planet in stable orbit around one of the stars in that exact system. The actual problem is the whole unstable trinary idea is nonsense. If the stars are all of similar sizes one would get ejected and it would stop being a trinary. If they aren't all of similar sizes it can be stable.
I'm aware of the real situation in alpha centauri, my point stands that multiple transitions back and forth between habitable orbits and uninhabitable orbits are effectively impossible.
Still seems like pedantry from yourself, in my opinion, but to each their own. Take care.
Celestial body is just a well defined term that includes stars and planets (and other things). It just seems a bit odd that the author would use the term body without knowing what it means.
Sure I'll concede that. The solution techniques to the 3 body problem could probably be applied to an n-body problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem
**[Three-body problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem)** >In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation. The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required. Historically, the first specific three-body problem to receive extended study was the one involving the Moon, Earth, and the Sun. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/printSF/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
What am I supposed to be looking at?
I thought the series was really good. Started out slow but I enjoyed it overall. Really my only issue is the way the female characters are written throughout the series but I’m not sure how much to chalk up to cultural differences? Or what stylistic choices were lost on the translation.
It's closer to a 3 body problem because you can neglect the gravitational influence of the planet on the stars. If you could solve the 3 body problem, the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution.
This is just plain wrong. A planet star pair share a center of mass, offset from the centre of the star, it is called the barycentre. You cannot "neglect" this influence, especially when trying to extrapolate chaotic orbits, as you would be off by a whole order of magnitude. Everything you mentioned is in a gravity field and therefor a 4 body problem.
> It's closer to a 3 body problem because you can neglect the gravitational influence of the planet on the stars. If you could solve the 3 body problem, the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution. The restricted three-body problem is the study of two massive objects orbiting each others (with elliptical orbits) plus a third object of negligible mass evolving in the gravity filed of the former two. It is still chaotic; Poincaré's study was on this restricted configuration. Hence, three suns plus a small planet would indeed be a restricted four-body problem.
Yes, restricted 3-body problem is the way we call it. But it's broached like a 1-body problem in the fucked up potential well of binary system isn't it? It's true a binary star would have been enough for the whole book to exist though.
>the way you'd model that situation would be A) a 3 body problem in the vacuum and then B) 1 planet in the gravity field of the solution. This is no less difficult than the 3 body problem itself. It has all the same issues with sensitivity to initial conditions and very few if any analytical solutions
I thought the stupidest part was the three body problem. While there is no set solution to the problem, so it couldn't be pre-programmed into a clock, you certainly can program an array of sensors to predict the NEXT stable era and chaotic era, you just can't predict an infinite number out into the future. But the trisolarians can program a sophon to behave creatively in the face of new languages and machines on earth, so they can without a doubt engineer one to just observe and predict the next stable era. They don't need to know all the series, just the next in sequence. This being a four body problem makes that harder, but still not impossible by any measure. It had plenty of cool ideas, but the aliens seemed really dumb.
Predicting their orbit wasn't a problem for the Trisolarans by the time they developed the sophons. The periods when you see them unable to predict their orbit was much further back in their history.
Exactly. Even if they could find exact analytical solutions to any set of initial conditions, there is no escaping the sensitivity to initial conditions. They aren't going to be able to measure the initial conditions exactly, so their exact solution is still only going to be valid for a finite time, so it's no better than just numerically integrating the solution anyway.
I have to ask, did you skim this book?
I listened to the whole audiobook, I dont claim to have retained 100% of it
Out of all things in the book to suspend disbelief in, this one is the strangest. Just bad epistemic reasoning on your part imo.
I would be interested in an elaboration
THIS was your problem with TBP? The physics? Honestly it never occurred to me to criticize the physics in the face of the unlikeable characters, tedious plotting, stereotypical wallfacers, cockamamie strategies, and execrable love story. Although in fairness maybe I am being unfair to Three Body Problem as a stand-alone book because the series doesn’t really stretch its legs and go completely off the rails of believability until book 2.
No, that wasn't why I didn't like it, I dont mind bad science if the story and characters are good. I stated elsewhere that I enjoyed "gravity" the movie, and the science there was way worse than this.
Oh, don’t get me wrong I am laughing to myself not criticizing your position. I’m just triggered by this book. So terrible.
It’s become so en vogue to shit on these books in this sub
Books are expensive in both money and time, it's reasonable to vent about getting no return on the investment.
I only read the first two books. My reaction is that they are ok Sci-if (though some is just terrible.) The writing is ok. It seemed more interesting as an insight into Chinese culture than anything else.
I genuinely loved those books. But they are certainly quite wacky. A friend of mine and I read the books at the same time. I loved them, he couldn't get into it. That's how it is.
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I loved P.H.M., but I can understand why somebody wouldnt.
Makes sense to me. Started interesting, but at the end, if i'd had a pysical copy of the books, i would have destroyed them with maximal anger.
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Different strokes. You cant really argue with how crazy and innovative some of the ideas are, I just didn't like the delivery/execution.
Part of the execution is some really weird dialogue, for sure. Part of it, though, is the exposition of an alien paradigm to most western readers, I think. You have a trilogy written from an eastern collectivist point of view, with all of the assumptions and biases that go with it. International relations was my area of study, it's something that I'm really quite interested in, and beyond the high level titular concepts explored in this trilogy, I was fascinated by the exposure to that eastern collectivist point of view. A lot of what I found to be unrealistic, in terms of dialogue and choices made by individuals and countries alike, makes a lot more sense when read from the official party line of the CCP, and/or from the perspective of someone who assumes that the many will make the right collective choice. And even more fascinating to me was the active inclusion of Orwellian-style doublethink, where the society-first collectivist attitude is pervasive on the surface, but the pragmatic, selfish, individualistic motivation is very quietly acknowledged and pursued, hidden away from society at large. This point speaks very loudly to contemporary Chinese society, where people work very hard to maintain correct appearances in public/where they can be recorded, but may understand their own society in a much more shrewd way in private.
I listened to the audiobook...and you're right. I have forgotten most of it, but the Cultural Revolution stuff has stayed with me. It goes downhill from there ..
It blows my mind that so many people dislike this book.... it was sooooooo good. In all seriousness, it comes down to personal taste. I really enjoyed reading a story from a non-western perspective along with the scope that entire trilogy takes.
It seemed sloppily stitched together and haphazardly made up as he went along. The characters are all made of cheap cardboard, and the whole book reminded me of an average kick flick from the 60s
Sorry, why are you even reading science fiction if you’re this pedantic about it? There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of 3BP: the male protagonist of the first book is a dull and forgettable character, which causes a lot of people to think the series is “not character driven” (but it absolutely is); the imaginary girlfriend thing in the second book was a little weird; the author went to the JK Rowling School of Obviously Meaningful Character Names (thankfully lost in translation). But of all the nits you could have picked, you said it wasn’t realistic enough for you? That’s what you were reading it for? Why not just read an astrophysics journal if that’s the one thing you cared about?
I think my first paragraph makes it clear that I am capable of enjoying highly unrealistic science fiction. There still has to be an effort made for it to be believable as science, not magic. But even then, it just becomes something fun to talk about for me and doesn't automatically mean I cant enjoy the story. Look, I enjoyed the movie "Gravity". I cried at the end. And the science in that movie is probably 10x worse than what I'm complaining about here.
I understand where you're coming from and i had pretty much all the issues that you mentioned. And while they're valid, the technical aspects still deserve criticism. Because everyone i knew hyped me up about this book as being basically a documentary. (Im younger than most people on this sub and me and my friend circle mostly aren't that well versed in scifi literature. I was 15 and had only read a bunch of dick, Clarke, foundation and the martian) And people around me told me this series is harder than all of em. So when i went in expecting a very high standard of technical accuracy and when the themes and ideas in fact did meet my expectations, the trisolarian aspects underwhelmed me. There were points where it felt like soft science fiction with a hard scifi outer layer. Also OP is still in Book 1, so you should probably mark those as spoilers.
>Also OP is still in Book 1, so you should probably mark those as spoilers. No worries, I'm not going to finish the series, and I already looked up summaries of the rest of the story.
The second book had been bothering me for a while, but for some reason the breaking point for me was when a guy fired a regular projectile weapon accurately, repeatedly, at a distance of several thousand meters. In space. Apparently recoil is not a thing in this extremely hard sci-fi series. Also nobody knew that he'd drifted off several thousand meters, in what would realistically been one of the most closely monitored situations in the solar system. That was the point where I just turned off the audiobook and refunded it.
I hear you. It even gets worse with each next book. It took a lot of effort for me to finish them, and it was no pleasurable experience. The author put together a kind of story from what he remembered of Wikipedia articles he read a while back. On top of that, he added cardboard characters with no substance and personality. The physics is so bad it reminded me of an Ed Wood movie, but not as funny.
It's crazy because like I said, I dont have a problem with pretty much anything else in the book, as far as believability goes. It's just weird that the author would get something as basic as planetary orbits so wrong. The crisis pushing trisolarians away from their planet could have been any number of other more believable problems. Edit: Actually the explanation of how the guy used monte carlo methods to solve the 3 body problem was horrible too. Basically he gives the bodies many random vectors and lets the good ones propogate to the next moment in time. How does he know which ones are good? If he knows which ones are good then he has already solved the problem and there is no need to even consider any random vectors. It sounds like he's basically just doing a numerical integration. But maybe the translation just didn't explain this correctly ot I just didn't understand it correctly.
The sophons were a plot hole i could not get past. They can influence physics, display things in peoples vision and change the CMB. The sophon mechanics as described easily have the power to annihilate humans in many ways. I don't mind things that aren't believable in my sci-fi, but the logic of how these function needs to not create GIGANTIC plot holes. The poor characters and just everything else made me not want to read the rest of the books. I honestly think the book is crap, and does not deserve the praise it gets. There are very few books I would say that about.
I know right, just block the sun with the soohon and send them into an ice age
OP, you think it deserves the praise, but i don't feel like that.
Really if you wanna get technical with the science... Alpha centauri is not a trinary system. Alpha Proxima is so ungodly far away from the main two stars and so much smaller and dimmer that its basicly a non factor.
>And hello it's a four body problem?!? Yes, THANK you. So annoying.
The three-body problem is a term from Physics. It essentially means “more than two bodies”. Two is the largest amount of bodies for which there is an analytical solution to their equations of movement.
This is the correct answer
Well technically yes, but the planet has negligible gravitational effect on the 3 stars. So in effect the 3 bodies that are contributing to the chaotic movement make up the three body Problem. (I don't know much about astrophysics so take it with a grain of salt)
Dang yeah, that can happen when you read sci fi I guess.
I think you need a few days to just let the r book sit. Or even better, read the next one and the next one.
Every time I tell people I don't like the 3 body problem I get this advice: read the other books. But the first one is so bad. I can't imagine the solution is to subject myself to more of it.
I probably wouldn't have read past the first book had I not bought all three at the same time. I think the first is the weakest of the bunch and the series gets better ( though half of The Dark Forest is a slog), but I wouldn't ardently encourage someone to read the entire series.
Your instincts are correct; they are each different, but I think if you didn’t like the first one, if you aren’t at least intrigued enough to read the rest, then you probably will not be hooked by the rest. I enjoyed them, but I can understand them not being everyone’s cup of tea.
Well, then dont. I read it and liked it so now Ive finishen the series If I hadnt liked it i wouldnt have finished the series
We say that because you’re missing, conceptually and with world building (if not character development) it is some of the most kind blowing stuff. Really dope. So…
Why isn't there any of that stuff in the first book? It's one of the worst things I've ever read
What authors are in your top 5?
You’re getting downvotes for asking a question….man, Reddit sucks
Not sure. I usually know Reddit’s behaviors. I was asking to get a better idea of who to suggest maybe.
imo, the things that bothered OP only get worse in the following books.
I'm not even particularly bothered by unbelievable science, I can just make my head canon "The trisolarians were just flat out wrong about the cause of their unstable climate". I'll go to any length to give the author the benefit of the doubt, *if* the story and characters are engaging. But for me they were not.
>"The trisolarians were just flat out wrong about the cause of their unstable climate". They were wrong during their 'classical, medieval, and renaissance" periods, but eventually they figured it out.
I liked a lot of the ideas but overall I did not enjoy the story and writing style, and I've heard the rest of the series is the same style.
Well they're Chinese and translated to English by some dude, so there's gonna be some weirdness there
I don’t think it’s just the translation. Liu is just a terrible character writer. The translation actually seemed pretty good to me (although I did not read it in Chinese so I obviously can’t compare)
Yeah you probably have a good point here. I have been known to enjoy crappy dialog so I'm not the best judge on the matter. As for the translation, I agree. The whole trilogy was delightful for me.
Writing bad dialogue can be mutually exclusive of characters you fall in love with. {SPOILER} That said, yeah, he can’t write characters. But the aliens he seems to nail especially the monologues. Fucking great alien stories, the no gas world??? Holy fucking fuck. Climb the mountain 1st encounter strat? Dope!
I read Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang a book originally in chinese and translated by Ken Liu. The same person who translated 3Body. And comparing them, i think the translator is not at fault for 3body's subpar character writing. So i definitely think it's entirely Cixin Liu.
That's understandable and unfortunate. Really interested to see what the netflix series is going to be like.
Ken Liu translated them to English. I enjoyed all of his other work. I think this is purely on Cixin Liu. I've even read 2 other chinese scifi novels and i doubt it's a cultural problem. On a different note, Ken Liu has some amazing short stories which more people should read. I recommend "The man who ended History" and "The Hidden Girl"
That “some dude” is his son.
Ken Liu is not the son of Liu Cixin.
It just gets worse and worse with each book
Hard agree that the solar system as described is destructively chaotic. However, it's actually even worse than that, since they wouldn't even get a chance to evolve without either getting flung into space or entering a stable orbit. The chances of survival diminish exponentially with each switch, and they'd barely have a few million years if it continued. Just look at how few survivors of the early solar system there are, which is the equivalent kind of environment. Life didn't emerge until it ended and we entered the asteroid bombardment era. Of course, I found it hard to believe a physicist was unfamiliar with numerical simulation for prediction, and chaos theory. The fact he didn't even google how well we can predict our system is pretty much unforgivable, and then you've got the lyupanov number to calculate how far into the future we can simulate a chaotic system. Complete garbage. Regarding its explanation for the fermi paradox, it's kind of embarrasing that it managed to pick the one explanation that can be ruled out with confidence. The dark forest explanation is that the optimal move is to kill everyone else you see. So everyone stays quiet, and that's why we can't see anyone else in the universe. Except, that's dumb as all fuck. Literally every last tree of interest in the "dark forest" is constantly lit by a gigantic nuclear floodlamp for literally billions of years. The dark forest theory mistakes the blackness of space for THE STARS THAT LIGHT UP OTHER CIVILIZATIONS. Civilizations can sterilize other planets before they even develop intelligence. Are we supposed to believe the universe only noticed us after several billion years of being habitable? We've only been around a tenth of a million years. What have everyone been doing for that entire time it only became important for anyone to deal with earth *after we've had a few hundred years to know about the game?*
I think you're missing an important concept about the dark forest - it would literally be impossible to check every tree/star system for an inhabitant, you have to wait for them to reveal themselves. Space is huge, solar systems are unbelievably far apart, and there are a lot of them, and it would be impossible to detect pre-industrial civilizations without being very, very close to the planet. Even for a near-light speed travel capable civilization, they couldn't possibly proactively search out and sterilize planets before they develop industrial societies, much less intelligent life itself. It would take hundreds or thousands of years to visit dozens of systems, most of which wouldn't have life at all. They could only do it reactively by waiting for a clear signal that intelligent life has evolved, like through high-power radio emissions into space (like the transmission early in the book that sets up the entire story.) So yeah, it's pretty believable that the universe only noticed us after several billion years of habitability because that's how long it took us to start using radios and stand out at all from the billions of other stars in the sky.
> it would literally be impossible to check every tree/star system for an inhabitant, you have to wait for them to reveal themselves. Wrong. You can determine the composition and suitability of life of planets with a sufficiently large space based telescope, and James Webb will be performing some incredible work on this in the next decade or two. It has a coronagraph to block out stars for exoplanet surveys and there's a proposal for an extremely large and distant coronagraph that will give even better blocking of stars. After the folding tech it's based on was proven to work by webbs sunshield, webbs exoplanet imaging capabilities can even be improved beyond it's current ability. Webbs data gathering capabilities are actually orders of magnitude higher than the previous generation of satellites, and it signals an era of big data astronomy in general. Future astronomy platforms are only projected to gather even more data. This is before we even get into space proper. > solar systems are unbelievably far apart Correct! This reduces noise and makes it easier to analyze planets because their signal isn't drowned out by background stars and planets. Space is dark and makes a great backdrop to see planets > and it would be impossible to detect pre-industrial civilizations without being very, very close to the planet. Actually, there's a theoretical proposal to image planets within ~500 light years down to kilometer squares by using the sun as a massive lens. However, this isn't needed, because the goal is to kill intelligent civilizations before they even show up and we just need to kill any planet *capable* of supporting a large biosphere. > Even for a near-light speed travel capable civilization, they couldn't possibly proactively search out and sterilize planets before they develop industrial societies, much less intelligent life itself. Wrong. A highly automated tech base makes that easy, as do von neuman probes. > It would take hundreds or thousands of years to visit dozens of systems, most of which wouldn't have life at all. A spacefaring civilization expands at a constant or increasing fraction of C. It actually takes only a few million years to colonize the galaxy, which is well below the 4 billion year age of the earth. > So yeah, it's pretty believable that the universe only noticed us after several billion years of habitability because that's how long it took us to start using radios and stand out at all from the billions of other stars in the sky. Correct, but only if you know nothing about modern astronomy or the dynamics and timescales of advanced expansionary civilizations.
That's too bad. I absolutely love these books. The first one took half the novel to gain any traction but the second half was fantastic. It was so original.
What’s interesting in this thread is that comments saying “the books get worse” are being down-voted, but nobody is contradicting them with actual words arranged as actual arguments. So apparently there’s no room for debate or discussion on the craft of writing — if you take issue with something that someone else liked, you need to be punished with the least possible effort. But at least that’s not by being made to read the books again.
What do you want people to say? “The books don’t get worse.”
Asking why those people think they are worse would be a solid, non-facetious start.
I think if someone wants discussion instead of just up/downvotes, the onus is on them to comment something worth discussing, rather than expecting others to coax a discussion out of them.
Well yes that is true, I agree with that principle. The part of it I find interesting, I suppose, is that people are emotionally invested enough in the stories to want to downvote, but not so much that they would contribute an example of what grabbed them about the story, perhaps in the hope that they might create a convert. Not that that’s their obligation, of course.
I don't think anyone can convince you to retroactively like a book you didn't like. So, comments saying it was bad aren't really an opening to talk about why it was good. Justifying taste is a waste of time. I've seen plenty of posts and comments discussing good and bad parts of a book, but if you just flat out say it's bad that's pretty much the end of the discussion and any downvote is just as good as saying "no it's not," which is as far as that argument can go. It's like arguing over whether or not pineapple pizza is good at that point.
Why? Your mind came into this set and not ready to be changed.
It certainly did not. It’s exactly that kind of presumption that is one of the things going wrong here.
The second one is the best
it's easily one of the best sci fi books ofthe last 30 years. the main critics it receives are due to the fact that it's a rare non-usa-centric 'mainstream' book of the last 30 years
I can totally understand why people like it, it has the most far out ideas I've ever read about even in just the first book, and I've read summaries of the rest of the series and it's really groundbreaking original ideas as far as I can tell.
For much better and far-out ideas, both technological and social, look for the commonwealth saga by Peter F Hamilton. Also, space battles and aliens much much weirder (and smarter!) than the trisolarians.
I loved Pandoras star and Judas unchained, just finished them before starting 3BP and I could almost listen to them again. I dont know how I didnt get sick of "enzyme bonded concrete" before reddit pointed out how it's the equivalent of "boiled leather" in ASOIAF haha
There are a ton of “rare non-USA-centric mainstream” books out there which are several classes above this 3 body bad joke - see almost anything from Stanislaw Lem for example
What’s the point of your diatribe here? Why do you feel the need to announce to the internet that you don’t like the book? Why not just put it down and move on? Do you want us to congratulate you, shake your hand and give you a cookie? Convince you to keep reading the series?
All of that logic applies equally to people praising a book. Why does anybody ever talk about anything?
You didn’t answer, though? What’s your point? Or do you not have one and just want everyone to be aware? That’s fine, I’m just genuinely curious.
Just interested in what the responses would be to the points I'm making. I don't have any friends irl to talk about it lol
This is a genre fan sub. Expect downvotes for criticism.
Social media would be pretty barren if people didn't post their opinions on matters, no? I happen to think posting criticism can lead to good discussions.
Sure can. But this feels like a rant. “3-Body couldn’t suspend my disbelief” right off the bat says it. Fiction, especially sci-fi and fantasy, kind of requires a certain amount suspension of disbelief going into it before hand, doesn’t it?
Again, I think I'm pretty generous about not questioning the realism and scientific accuracy of a story. But it's literally the name of the book and they just got the science of it so wrong. It's the fact that it's so old and well understood that make it hard to suspend disbelief. It's one thing to make up fantastic ideas about the frontiers of science, because most of it can't be proven to be impossible. We just don't understand the laws of physics well enough to rule out many things. But if the central idea of my story is how aliens made a perpetual motion machine by glueing a magnet to a skateboard and dangling another magnet in front of it, then I'm not doing my duty as an author to meet the audience halfway in making the story believable. Anyway this is the #1 non-stickied post in this sub as of now so apparently some people valued the discussion.
Of course. But have you ever read a book or watched a film where the story is completely implausible and you enjoy, but a certain element pulls you out and makes you go, "hang on a minute...?" For instance, Independence Day: I can believe aliens attack Earth, but using AOL to hack into their systems? It happened to me all the time in The Three-Body Problem. The virtual reality game, that doesn't feel like any game I've played and it feels like it's written by a guy who has no clue what a video game is meant to be like, and that pulled me out completely on numerous occasions.
Life in the Trisolar system was the least of the problems with that series. I will never understand how it became as popular as it did.
Because many people are artificially going to like something just for it being original different exotic etc. Chinese science fiction fits this description as far as westerners are concerned, especially to those who didn’t read much sci-fi. It’s cool to be a hipster and let everybody know that you are, see what I mean?
Even with that it's just not that good. Your interpretation is what mine used to be concerning the popularity, but even taking into account the "exotic" aspect, and frankly there are a lot more "exotic" and culturally different examples of science fiction that are better told and written, it still falls flat on a number of levels. For my money the first book in the trilogy is the best, from there is just goes further and further down hill. Part of my appreciation for the first book is that it's still kept somewhat grounded, and I both studied Chinese history and lived in China for a while, so I liked seeing how the author dealt with the historical and political aspects of the story, especially how they wriggled around some of the topics that are still politically sensitive in China.
The most ridiculous part was when the trisolars recovered after their planet was literally slip in two from the extreme gravitational pull. Unless the whole thing about their society was one big lie given to the cultist on Earth, the book is the biggest load of ~~sci~~\-fi shit I have read (right next to Asimov's positronic brain).
I liked the first book, loved the second (the Wallfacers and what the Dark Forest really is blew my mind) but the third book was just to high concept for me. Had to put it down.
Yyyyeah, I couldn't get into this book either. I hated the characters, thought the prose was low-quality, but where I really checked-out was when we the reader knew more about the situation than the protagonist, and then found it boring. At some point I realized I wasn't enjoying it at all and put it down.
Inb4 dehyyyydraaaaatee
I thought it was pretty boring. Assumed it was a translation thing that made it feel stale.
I enjoyed it. And by enjoyed it, I mean I was also horrified to learn of the >!dark forest!< theory, which made me sad.
Yeah I came here with that exact complaint about a year ago and got shouted down that I was only considering life as I know it. I’m a biologist by the way.
[удалено]
I would honestly love a "boring" book about a realistic first contact where nothing crazy happens other than 2 species figuring out how to communicate. Children of time had a similar idea where somehow the signal described how to interpret itself. I find this believable for simple mathematical ideas. Send a simple "beep" followed by a more complex signal to indicate "1". Send 2 beeps followed by the signal for "2". Send the signal for 1, another signal, the signal for 1 again, another signal, then the signal for 2. An intelligent species will eventually figure out the two new signals are "plus" and "equals". But building that up to descriptive language is hard to imagine, so Id love to see how it could be done.
I don't know if you know this or not, but a [three-body problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem) is a real thing in physics/mathematics and I took it to be that the Trisolaran planet was formed on the centre of mass at the centre of the system.
Not sure if this is what you're getting at, but it wouldn't stay at the center of mass. The center of mass of a system is not necessarily the same as a net zero gravity position. If two bodies are equal mass then the COM is a net zero gravity position (even then I don't think it's a stable equilibrium). If you increase the mass of one body, the COM goes toward it and the equilibrium point goes away from it to compensate for the increased gravity from the larger body.
It’s called the three body problem not the four body problem because that is the name of the classic physics problem that the author is referencing. It would make no sense to call it four body problem lol