The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like The Three-Body Problem. Some people whose judgment I usually trust recommended the book highly, so when I heard opinions that it is a serious novel about contact with another civilization, I immediately put it on my "To read" list. Alas, I ended up disappointed. For the most part, I found reading the novel to be a tedious task. If not for a few special features, my rating would barely reach two stars.

Trying to avoid spoilers I will list the few factors that save the novel from a "Do not recommend" rating. First of all, the very beginning of the novel describes dramatic events during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, the purges, "struggle sessions," public humiliations, and political murders committed by ideologically crazed teenagers. It provides a sobering commentary on the dangers of ideology and human propensity for evil.

Then there is mathematics, which is, for me, the best thing about the novel. The three-body problem is an actual problem in mathematical physics of three masses revolving around each other, whose trajectories we want to compute/predict. Unfortunately, an explicit solution of such a model does not exist, and most initial conditions of the system lead to chaotic solutions. The author of the novel well explains the model (three suns orbiting each other) and presents the practical consequences of the chaotic solution.

To continue with mathematics, the author also writes about the unfolding of a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one. A nine-dimensional structure is unfolded into a two-dimensional one. The topic is close to my heart, as I supervised students' project on unfolding a four-dimensional cube into 3D and 2D.

Finally, and most importantly, there is Trisolaris, the system of three suns orbiting each other, with all its chaotic motion. Solaris is a wonderful, serious sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem, the master of the genre, about the impossibility of contact with alien beings. Lem's His Master's Voice remains the best novel about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Coincidentally, The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006, the same year that Lem died. I would like to believe that Cixin Liu's novel about Trisolaris is a kind of homage to Stanisław Lem.

Other than the math bits and the grim stories of the Cultural Revolution, I don't find much to recommend in the novel. The plot, which in my view lacks coherence, is quite silly and bordering on laughable in some places. I found it hard not to giggle at passages like "The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers."

In the conclusion, I will repeat that for a serious, well-written, and interesting sci-fi novel about contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, I recommend His Master's Voice by Lem.

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