Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don’t get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
You are correct. And it’s not a translation problem, I’ve heard native speakers that read the original say it’s precisely as awkward there.
It’s the most over-rated trash I’ve ever encountered, it’s like it’s written by someone that discovered the genre but never read a single SF book and just assumed everyone that reads it is a teenager. There’s more handwaving going on than a David Blaine performance.
And the later books show plotholes you could throw a truck through, when you get to the deus-ex-machina plot device that invalidates the whole marianne. And the character development never improves, it’s just, I have to use the word again, awkward.
I wanted my money back.
Whoa whoa whoa, hang on there a second. David Blane would never use enough energy to wave a hand. David Copperfield maybe.
My bad. You’re right Copperfield is way more of a flashy showman.
I just pulled the first magician I could think of out of my ass. Like a rabbit. Now how the hell did that get up there?
Dude, if I had a nickel for every rabb… Know what? This should go to a different thread.
From your fiery post, seems you had a wild hare up your arse.
Three Body Problem is what I call “big ideas” sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader’s eyes / observers.
Many of Alastair Reynolds’ novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.
Not everyone’s cup of tea, and I completely understand why.
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To each their own!
I didn’t super care about the characters but the sci fi problems, solutions and ideas of the whole series were a blast.
That being said, I grew up reading a lot of classic/“hard” sci fi so I’m pretty used to characters taking a back seat to fun/cool ideas.
Yeah, I felt it was largely a throwback to 1940s and 1950s western SF. Liu feels a lot like Asimov or early Heinlein. I was thinking it was like the kind of thing that a rapidly industrializing society would write as part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Damn, that’s a neat take. Hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, the sheer, weird “what would happen if” premise is what kept me reading, so all of the exposition was yummy rather than annoying
Liu’s short stories are all like that, if you get the chance. What if the world had to be moved out of solar orbit? What if a small class of Chinese schoolchildren were chosen to be representative of all humanity? He has these bold, brash concepts that feel like they were written in a USA that felt that the moon was a stepping stone to the stars. Like Heinlein writing about a kid boshing up a spaceship in the yard.
Liu kinda represents a China that can dream really big in the same way.
I think books 2 and 3 could easily be separated into many short stories.
Or probably the other way around, book 1 was so successful that he stuck various unfinished short stories together to make 2 & 3.
Exactly how I felt! The premise and everything was so much fun. Like, the opening “mystery” of why physics seemed broken was such a wildly cool idea and the answer was so neat but opened up more etc.
Interesting, I really hadn’t considered much beyond the political context and hadn’t really thought about the societal ones but now that you mention it, yeah absolutely.
Yeah that’s the context I came at it from as well. It feels like a very Chinese perspective, which is novel compared to what I usually read.
I got a lot out of the excellent English translation, but it absolutely reads differently than a novel written from an English speaking/thinking person, or even when compared to English translated from a Romance or Germanic language.
Aliens live on a planet orbiting three suns. The planet regularly gets scorched by those suns. Hot enough to melt rocks. How tf these aliens keep evolving and advancing all the way to space travel?
It is utterly ridiculous.
Rant incoming
The three body problem is chaotic dynamical system. Chaotic means, between other things, that it is unpredictable: given two different starting points, even incredibly close, their behavior will diverge (become different) exponentially fast over time (and we saw during the Covid epidemic that exponentially fast is really damn fast).
So having a super smart mathematician approximating its simulation… that’s a load of bullshit, hot and steamy. That’s a master level example of how not to spend your days, because any approximation you do is going to impact your results exponentially fast.
Furthermore, the three body problem’s solutions don’t need to be bounded. What does this mean? That there is no reason for the planet to stay in orbit of the three suns. Any time it gets far, it could come back, but just as easily keep going further away and lose connection with its starting system. Any time it gets near the suns it could just as easily fall into one of them. So, most likely, during geological ages, the planet would have either gotten ejected or eaten up. If you want to go even further back, there is no way an asteroid belt would generate a planet in these conditions.
Finally, there are well-known configurations of solutions of the three body problem. Configurations are very specific situations (usually assuming two suns of equal mass and a sun that is much smaller and much further away) that can sustain periodic solutions, aka behaviors that repeat after a certain time. If a planet ever got generated in a three suns system, it would definitely need to be in one of these configurations.
The nail in the coffin: if there are three suns and a planet… it’s the four body problem. If you consider the planet to have basically zero mass with respect to the suns, you call it the restricted four body problem.
And this is why knowing way more than the author spoils the fun :( I could not enjoy the science part at all… even when i tried to suspend my disbelief.
Exactly what keeps me from writing anything, which is silly, but I hate the idea of somebody reading something I wrote and thinking, “what an idiot” 😔
Oh, I am sorry… but you can see this thread: even if there are quite some inaccuracy on the math and physics side of things, many people still really enjoyed this book (my partner included, even after hearing my rant many time). You should not censor yourself! (But accept criticism and improve from it). You go gender-neutral-guy!
Haha, thank you, I appreciate the sentiment! I recognize that this is a Me Problem, but in classic fashion I think I can overcome this, too, with just a little bit of self-improvement in a slightly new area of expertise. I mean really, how hard could it be?
I read/watch popular but stupid stuff to remind myself things don’t need to be accurate to be entertaining.
Easy. DEHYDRATE!
Here’s how I understand it to work.
They have random periods of activity in which they advance as a species so they make large leaps in scientific progress when they are awake as opposed to a slow and steady build up of knowledge. Their large leaps in advancements becomes a disadvantage at times but more so their way of thinking in general.
Because they kinda portray themselves as humanoid that’s how you’re lead to think about them, like approximately human sized smart mamal-ish creatures, when really they are between ant to beetle sized hive mind creatures. This is why the more of them that they are able to have active between the harsh sun cycles the faster they advance. Also makes the whole dehydration thing easier to swallow.
And how do Trisolarians manage to transfer knowledge from one stable era to the next? The surface of the planet literally burns during the chaotic era. Which begs another question, how do they rehydrate? With what water?
They just gather their dragon balls, obviously!
I liked it, even if the characters weren’t great. I liked book 1 in kind of a detective/mystery novel kind of way. The first book is very different from the next two, which is where I think the series really starts to address larger questions. It’s still kind of flimsy and the characters might get worse, but I like some of the questions and hypotheses about the universe that it addresses. It gets into a more philosophical approach to the universe and how other species may interact with each other, mutually assured destruction, and how the human race would react to a sword of Damocles hanging over our head for 400 years. It’s told from a Chinese perspective as well, so it was interesting to me to see how he thinks these might play out as opposed to my assumptions coming from a western perspective.
I think the dark forest hypothesis as an answer to Fermi is reasonable, and I like a lot of the big picture ideas.
But yea, it’s not really a character driven series.
I think there’s a real struggle in translating Chinese literature into English.
For what it’s worth, the second book - The Dark Forest - starts off much stronger and builds from there, making the first book feel more like it was just introducing the story.
the Dark Forest sucks just as hard if not more so. the premise of the story
spoiler
Mutually Assured Destruction
isnt an original thought, but the author refuses to acknowledge it until the end, pretending like it wasn’t obvious the whole story. then he hand waves the problems he sets up (how do you deal with an alien technology so much more sophisticated than your own) pretending like the sophons just couldn’t deal with the threat. All this and the character doesn’t ever really develop. Things happen to him, but we don’t get any meat to his personality, just external bullshit.
I started listening to the third book because I am a gluten for punishment and I have a long commute, but it just meandered. If it was another author Id give them the benefit of the doubt, but I havnt been able to get through it.
Dark Forrest: Gump with a Gun
The premise of The Dark Forest is extremely explicitly not MAD though.
The point of the story is
spoiler
The wallfacers have to have a secret plan that they cant share because the sophons can intervene if it is known. The Sophons are so powerful because they can interfere with any technology, only the human mind is beyond their reach. So he creates a technology to do exactly what he tested out that would achieve mutually assured destruction and the sophons cant do anything about it because… reasons.
It was obvious the entire time what he was planning and the result of that plan was MAD. If you come to destroy us, we will both die. He couldnt say it outloud because the premise was he was a wallfacer and there is no good reason this particular plan would suceed.
Ah, I see what you mean, I thought you meant the Dark Forest theory itself.
and the third book is even better.
But I agree with OP that the writing is bad, I just enjoy the intrigue and sci-fi enough to read the books, esp. at that particular part of the second book (the first book and first part of the second book were admittedly less compelling to me than the rest of the second book and the third book).
Thank you.
I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.
I disagree with you on 3 Body, but I love reading reviews that match my opinion just so I can be like, “Exactly! Thank you!”
Not to mention the entire premise is invalidated by a cursory review of the Alpha Centauri system.
Thank you. It was so annoying reading that constantly thinking “that’s not how the three-body problem works, and even if it was, that sure as hell doesn’t describe Alpha Centauri.”
And that’s just the beginning. People calling this shit hard sci-fi is crazy.
I mean, the first part of the book is kinda exactly how it works. Well 4 body, anyways.
Tap for spoiler
They’re trying to find an equation to know when their planet will pass out of the habitable zone. Every equation fails to describe the orbits. So they try to simulate it, and it seems effective, but eventually the errors accumulate and the simulation fails to describe the orbits.
But yeah, we have been able to tell for a long time the Alpha Centauri isn’t like that.
No, they’re not just trying to find an equation, which may not be possible. They say it’s impossible to predict where the objects will be in the near term, which is nonsense.
The three-body problem doesn’t say it’s unpredictable, just that there is no universal equation to describe it. You can still determine where things will be with a high degree of probability with iteration. The earth, sun, and moon are a three-body problem but we know where they will be tomorrow, next year, next century, next millennium, etc. The error bars increase with time but the moon isn’t suddenly going to be ejected beyond the orbit of Pluto in an unpredictable way due to some bullshit from the chaos of the three-body problem. The entire solar system is a (very large number)-body problem, but we know where every major body is going to be with a large degree of certainty for a long time.
Whether or not they could have found a way to preserve their civilisation thorough the periods inimical to life is also beside the point. They claim they couldn’t predict the occurrences, which is bullshit. You don’t need a computer for that, even a biological computer (which I admit was actually kind of a cool concept), you just need paper and pen.
You can’t have pretentions to hard sci-fi and just talk nonsense. Either be hand-wavy soft sci-fi or make your explanations conform to our best current understanding. You can’t try to explain shit and also get the most basic concepts wrong.
Predicting the orbits of the sun-earth-moon system is easy to do accurately because of the relative sizes and proximity of the bodies.
You don’t even need to treat it like a 3-body problem, because the size of the earth/moon have an inconsequential impact on the sun, the size of the moon had an inconsequential impact on the earth, and the proximity of the moon means the sun has an inconsequential impact on it too. So you use a traditional “sphere of influence” 2 body problems, and get very accurate results.But when the bodies are all large enough to significantly affect eachother’s orbits, like a trinary star system, then doing simulation (iterative calculations) quickly builds up errors, especially as the steps are far apart (which they must be with their biological computer, given how slow it is). I haven’t run the exact calculations, but I’ve done interactive simulation in the past and it can pretty quickly fall apart
Edit:
You’re gonna look at me and you’re gonna tell me that I’m wrong? Am I wrong? She wore a crown and came down in a bubble, Doug. Grow up bro, grow up.
Now i just think you’re being disingenuous.
Are you really trying to say you think the author understands the three-body problem?
Are you saying the errors from iterative calculations of three stars and a planet build up so fast, and that they move so fast, that they can go to sleep one night with everything fine and completely without warning wake up the next morning with a sun filling the entire sky or all three suns looking as far away as Sol from Neptune?
When in the book do you think that happens in a single night?
Do you mean in the video game invented by the aliens as a puzzle game, presenting a dramatized retelling of their society’s history to keep the humans engaged in the puzzle, that clearly played it super lose with the passage of time?I assume the Trisolarins were taking a little poetic licence there. I was being hyperbolic. I don’t remember the author being specific about the timeline but I had the impression the cataclysms came on pretty quickly (much too quickly to be explained by errors building up, I would think they would constantly update their calculations with their observed track so significant errors should always remain well into the future), and they were just trying to get several months, maybe a year, of warning so they could cache some things that would give them a headstart next time around. Why they didn’t just have that all the time, i don’t recall that being explained. I guess short-sighted politicians are universal.
Are you just going to keep moving the goalposts and nitpicking my characterizations, or answer the question? Do you think the author understands the basic concept of the three-body problem?
I assume you have an opinion on it because you stuck your nose in here. Or did you just want to throw out an “um ackchyually”?
So here was my experience: finished Project Hail Mary, Google for books similar to it, was recommended 3 Body Problem. Cool. Start listening to it on audible while running errands, a LOT of stuff about the cultural revolution in China, and a very depressed smart young woman and a satellite dish that does weird stuff… a few chapters in and no humor, no science, nothing even remotely like Project Hail Mary or Andy Weir’s other writing. So I dropped it.
A year or two later and Netflix adapted the novels into a TV show. Gave it a watch and got pretty bought in. Definitely some cool mystery, intrigue, done if it a bit cheesy, but raised a lot of cool challenges and questions. Also I could see that there was actually some science coming in my science fiction story. So I went back and gave the book a go.
I finished all the books and… it’s a bit of a mess narratively. I felt like the author was REALLY good at coming up with creative problems that seemed insurmountable. And many of the solutions to those problem (many, not all) were equally clever and creative. He also came up with the (as far as I’m aware) completely novel concepts of alien biology, culture, and psychology and fictional technologies. But the story very often yadda yadda’d over complex narratives and geopolitical events with time jumps after making them seem like they were incredibly important before hand. He also comes up with some very cool concepts like the Wall Facers and the massive ramifications of having a handful of people that are unquestionable and work in complete secret and will have the highest levels of machinations in the works to save humanity, including one that DOES NOT WANT THE JOB. Such a good setup for so many possibilities… And then they almost immediately backpedal and undermine that with political oversight, borderline cartoon supervillain plans from some of them, and revocation of all of their statuses. There’s other stuff too that’s just disappointing from a narrative perspective.
But I kept going. I think because the technology was cool, the stakes were massive, the challenge was interesting, some of the mystery was really compelling, and I enjoyed the uniqueness of it all. It could have definitely been better. I think a lot of the ideas could have been explored more thoroughly and more cleanly. But, I don’t regret reading it. I think it was pretty cool for the things it did well.
I think I’ll rather read Project Hail Mary for the fourth time.
Fair. It’s great.
After much struggle I got some geeky friends of mine to start a book club. I suggested this as the first book based on the hype. Almost no one finished it. When we got together to drink and talk, only two others bothered to dial in (It was during COVID and we are scattered), no one else finished it.
I dislike this book in so many different ways. It has some interesting Ideas and some surprising insights into the modern Chinese view of the revolution, but as an actual story? Ive read better fan fic.
I read all three. I thought they excelled at creating new plot devices. Sentient particles, Thought as light, dimensional weapons. Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones. I thought the characters and plot were… unsatisfying. But I believe that is mostly intended as a portrayal of people’s failings. I’d say it’s a worth it read for real sci fi junkies though. Definitely disagree that it is “Not good”, but taste is subjective. They seemed longer than they needed to be… I dunno.
It is easy to come up with nonsense. I much more respect works that explore the consequences of one fantastical thing.
Its really hard to come up with new sci fi tropes! And Liu casually comes up with a dozen new ones.
Unfortunately, then he shoves them all into the same book. He needs to be the show runner of a sci-fi TV series.
You are absolutely correct OP. They are genuinely terrible books. And no, it’s not - as some people like to claim - that book 1 is bad but the series gets better. Out of sheer morbid fascination I have made it to book 3, and it absolutely, categorically, does not get better. Dark Forest is actually worse than Three Body, considerably so. At least all the cultural revolution backstory in book 1 is kind of interesting and well executed. Dark Forest is a steaming pile of bullshit; utterly unlikable characters, one of the weakest versions of a scifi future ever committed to page, endless chapters worth of dumb Death Note style “Aha, but I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that…” bullshit, and the signature premise of the entire book is a theory about the universe grounded in some absolutely atrocious game theory that can be disproved in five minutes. And ten chapters into Death’s End… Yeah, it’s still awful. Even more unlikable or just outrageously unbelievable characters - the author writes like he’s never actually interacted with another human being - and dull plotting with no sense of pacing or urgency.
Cixin Liu has some strengths as a writer; at times he shows himself adept at building anticipation, he’s good at knowing how to lay out his ideas towards a conclusion without suddenly dumping everything on you at the last second (something a lot of writers struggle with) and he really is very good at big crazy scifi ideas that make you go “Wow, that’s so cool.” But he’s a bad writer. I compare him a lot to Asimov, in that he’s strong on ideas and weak on everything else. But Asimov was primarily known for his short stories, where those strengths could shine and the weaknesses could be hidden (which is exactly why the Foundation novels get worse as they move away from being collections of novellas and towards being full length novels). Liu on the other hand writes interminably long books that absolutely expose those weaknesses. When it shines, it’s really cool. There’s one particular sequence in Dark Forest that really does stand out as being an incredibly inventive idea, executed very competently. But the standout moments just aren’t worth the dross you have to wade through to get there.
The fictional science of the sophons was also bad.
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The book author thought that protons were fundamental particles. Protons are made up of quarks. So the idea of unfolding a proton when it’s made up of 3 quarks doesn’t make sense. Put 3 marbles next to each other. Label the 3 marbles a proton. Unfold it. ???
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Quantum teleportation doesn’t allow for FTL communication.
Wouldn’t argue with point 1, but point 2 may be a misunderstanding of Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, or particle entanglement, which may enable ftl comms.
which may enable ftl comms.
It can’t. Take two playing cards and without looking at them, put them in an envelope and mail one to your friend across the country. Open up your envelope. You now know what card your friend has instantly. You can’t communicate instantly this way.
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Not crazy at all imo. I’ve only read the first book and I don’t plan on reading the rest. I found it interesting for the mainland Chinese societal influences that were sometimes explicit, but often just peeking through. It’s obvious that the writer is from a different background as scifi authors that grew up in a western country. But the character writing and scifi aspects, were only kinda meh imo.
I had also read someone recommending the books as hard scifi and I can’t agree with that either. The three body star system is a very interesting premise, but the godlike single proton that can envelop a planet is pure fantasy. Too much deus ex machina for good world building.
I enjoyed it and have recommended it, but then I reread it and yea, it’s not great. But it had some interesting new concepts, for which I’m still grateful I read the books, like the dark forest theory.
Except that the dark forest hypothesis completely falls apart when you examine it for more than a few minutes.
SPOILER
Basically, the fundamental problem is that it applies game theory really badly, by treating the value of “survival” as functionally infinite, which is something that - if we actually applied it in reality - would make life unlivable. For example, eating a chocolate bar contains a miniscule risk to your survival. But if you multiply any minute fraction by infinity you get infinity, so the risk outweighs any possible value you could obtain. This becomes true for every decision you can possibly make. At both the individual and societal levels, treating survival as a purpose that outweighs everything else just leads to total paralysis. Any society that operated on those principles would never actually advance to the point of being capable of interacting with the wider universe. Liu even has to treat humanity itself - our only extant example of a space-faring species - as an almost impossible outlier because our own behaviour completely shatters the hypothesis. Even our studies of animal life on earth repeatedly demonstrate that curiosity and altruism are actually traits that evolution selects for, not against. Yeah, it solves Fermi’s Paradox, but that’s literally the only argument for it. It fails every other test possible. It’s a really interesting idea for a scifi setting, but it’s not remotely supported by reality.
I know it falls apart quickly, but I still like it as a concept. I also like dragons, magic and immortal beings as concepts.
I just read it as a parallel to the realists perspective of international relations on a cosmic scale. It the survival of the state in relation to other states that is the goal. In that respect it holds up well enough.
But even there it falls apart, because if it had any merit then every country in the world would be North Korea. And even that wouldn’t be enough, because even North Korea trades with China. The idea that the natural state of the world is total paranoia and the instant annihilation of every civilisation simply doesn’t hold up. The realist’s perspective of international relations actually serves to disprove; even when you begin from the presumption that their own survival is the primary goal of every civilisation, it can be observed that the optimal behaviours that arise from that goal are cooperative, not defensive.
Countries on the same planet results in a completely different situation. Dark Forest theory is a result of great distance (the enemy could become technologically superior within the time it would take just to gather intel), being hidden (so MAD doesn’t apply), and having a large number of civilizations (even if only a very small percentage of civilizations send out dark forest strikes, the principle holds.)
I agree that the natural state with the total paranoia is tad silly. Even the books toy with the idea of cooperation between Tri-solaris and Earth. It would have been better if it was treated as the domineering ideology in their area of space and a theory with flaws from the characters.
If North Korea location was secret, there where no way of telling the difference between North Korea and Switzerland, we had no countermeasures against nukes, and communication increases the risk that North Korea finds you, tensions would way more likely lead to a fist strike doctrines. You only really need one actor with the doctrine to force others to adjust to it.
I’m not really sure what you mean. I don’t think ‘infinifte’ value vs arbitrarily high value makes a difference here. Also evolutionarily, intraspecies collaboration is beneficial, not necessarily interspecies. Although we’re talking about civilizations making decisions, not animal behaviour.
It’s not even a good analogy, the basic idea of a ‘silent dark forest’ is pretty nonsense. Forests aren’t quiet at night. Animals aren’t hiding out to avoid predators. Most aren’t active cause it’s dark and it’s hard to see, so they sleep instead. Most predators are in the same boat, they typically hunt in late evening/early morning, when their prey is also active. That’s ignoring the plethora of nocturnal species of course.
There’s literally no part of the theory I find compelling, it seems like a poor conclusion based on a foolish assumption.
