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The writing in The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu) feels tacky
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Fiction Books
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I personally had a bigger problem with the science... I am a scientist and I worked on chaos and the three body problem, there are many elements in there that just killed my immersion by being wrong. One of them was the mathematician that was computing the solution to the three body problem. No sane person would consider that worthwhile! Chaos means sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Between other things, that means that any error you are making is going to be exponentially magnified in finite time. So if you only considered 3 digits of accuracy in your solution, you can just throw your solution away after a couple of time steps. But if you considered 30 digits of accuracy? well... you only get one or two extra time steps in which you solution still makes a little bit of sense! Check out this youtube video on the double pendulum, another well-known chaotic system, to get a feeling: https://youtu.be/ldnEHycw40E
Still talking about math, when the "the baby problem" planet is kicked away from the two-stars system, likely it would not be able to ever come back. Assuming the planet never actually leaves the solar system is quite a large assumption.
Thank you. That’s a great point. I hadn’t thought about it.
This kind of debunking is much appreciated! And doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book (and it’s sequels).
You must have a high bar for science fiction as a scientist, do you have any recommendations tangential to this book? Thanks.
Tangential to TTBP I’d say “children of time”. Something about the writing style put me a bit off, but the story is great. It’s very plot oriented, with a saga that spans centuries without feeling drawn out. The characters, while being a bit simple, are compelling and believable. It relates to TTBP because it also talks about two competing civilizations/planets.
Without restrictions, the hardest sci-fi that I utterly enjoyed was Anathem. It plays with physics, in particular quantum mechanics, with such mastery it’s hard not to believe the conclusions he draws. And in the meantime he plays with a lot of other concepts as well. As many of the books of the same author, it tends to put too many concepts together, but it’s worth the ride.
How did I forget Dune?? I thought about how to answer your question for a day, then forgot half the answer.
Dune is absolutely great! The science is spot on, the writing sucks you in, the characters are so appealing, each with their motivation and ideologies. Everything is just amazing. It builds a whole galaxy by looking at only a handful if characters, all on the same small planet. It’s still revolutionary, in particular its focus on ecological terrorism is extremely modern.
Good to know! This is a favorite of mine as well.
It gets recommended a lot, but Red Mars has a lot if science content, especially geology-related, in case you haven’t read it yet.
I had never heard of it! And there is goes, on my reading list. Thanks! I have hardly read any geology focus scifi book yet… exciting!
Thank you very much! Luckily, I have not yet read either of these — looking forward to them.