this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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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.

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[–] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] frozenpopsicle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] joonazan@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] JokeDeity@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

Haven't read it, but the show was interesting enough for me to watch the entire season.

[–] Profligate_parasite@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I also did not love it. The premise is fascinating and is relatively unique as far as 'first contact' stories go. At the end of the day, though, the first book is much more about Chinese history than aliens, and the 'science' part of the science fiction is so garbage that I had a hard time getting through it. I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts if you're looking for a really cool first-contact story.

This is the correct answer. The sequel was excellent as well, but nothing has ever touched Blindsight for me in terms of sheer alienness

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The sequels went on forever, to the point that I figured out what the Dark Forest theory was early on and had to finish that book just to find out I was right. Characterisation is pretty non-existent, it’s true.

[–] nik9000@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

I felt the same way about the characterization. I thought it might be a translation thing. I don't know that many folks that read it in Chinese, but I'm leaning towards "no, it's just like that."

It's a fun series to read a wiki about.

[–] timeghost@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not to mention the entire premise is invalidated by a cursory review of the Alpha Centauri system.

[–] roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 days ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 44 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 8 points 2 days ago

That's because it's great!

OK maybe it's not like objectively great, like in a literary sense, but me and my friends really enjoyed it for its unique voice and fun mystery.

It also spawned so many great conversations between the other programmers I know.

[–] Sagan_Wept@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The three body problem is the ONLY SciFi series to repeatedly blow my mind. I read a lot of scifi, it's always the same stuff.

[–] Lazhward@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I read a lot of scifi, it's always the same stuff.

As someone who enjoys sci-fi this sounds like a very odd statement from someone who reads a lot of it. I wouldn't say I've read that much sci-fi but I could quite easily name some books that could hardly be any more different. Sci-fi seems incredibly diverse to me.

[–] Harrk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Same for me! But it’s also the first proper sci-fi series I read so it’s a bit skewed haha. However, I did truly enjoy it for the most part. Wasn’t a fan of how the ending turned out as one of the events just felt… cheap. Not to mention the lead character in the third book made me want to scream in frustration…

I’ve tried other sci-fi since and I’ve yet to find something that captures me. I started the Bobiverse which is a fun take, but it’s a completely different theme. So if any sci-fi vets have any recommendations I’m all ears!

[–] MaddestMax@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was very happy to stumble upon this post. I’ve been struggling through The Dark Forest for what feels like forever. I’m usually a pretty voracious reader, but this series is like quicksand to me. It’s really really boring. I just keep hoping it will get interesting. It threatens to…and then starts sucking again. I never DNF books, but I’m so SO tempted here. Glad there are others out there!

[–] rogue_moravec@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yea, the Dark Forest is a slooooooooog. While I liked the way the last book wraps up the metaphysics of this world, getting there was utterly exhausting.

[–] MaddestMax@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Dang. Does that mean I need to finish it all out?? 😂

[–] rogue_moravec@sh.itjust.works 1 points 40 minutes ago

Mileage may vary. There are so many books out there, find ones that speak to you. Not that effort in reading is bad, but I think this series is really, really mixed. You can always go back later if you're curious.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 50 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] MyBrainHurts@lemmy.ca 31 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Love the books but completely agree. I devoured the trilogy but all of the charcters felt like cardboard cut outs. I liked the concept and the story, but hated all of the charcters and the writing in general.

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[–] OhStopYellingAtMe@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I’m glad you said it. I read so many great reviews for it. It was recommended to me. I tried to read it. Couldn’t get past the first few chapters.

I’m an avid sci-fi reader. I’ve read hundreds of sci-fi books of all sorts; from goofy pulp to sci-fi-smut to high stakes epic novels. But I simply could not get into Three Body Problem.

I thought maybe it was that something was lost in translation.

[–] 332@feddit.nu 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Thank you.

I read them all, hated them, and spent a good week finding negative reviews so I could fume at them in company.

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[–] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

In the middle of reading it now. Its a dual effect. One is that its natively written in chinese so a lot of its cultural stuff like the beginning will go over english readers heads not knowing that the chinese people literally had an violent orwellian book burning period of their history against academia. I imagine it was an attempt to pull readers in emotionally but Its hard to be emotionally invested in a cultural history you have no knowledge of and its paced badly.

The second is that the sci-fi genre is unfortunately nearly universally populated by nerds with good ideas pretending to be writers. This results in very interesting ideas and thought provoking settings being brought low by eye wateringly boring characters, piss poor narrative through lines, souless or confusing writing style, ect. Go ahead and try to read an Asimov book or Dune and you'll realize This was always the case for decades at least.

In fairness to the authors its hard to tell a civilization spanning futuristic world ending drama while also keeping it grounded.

As an enjoyer of sci-fi you kind of just have to power through the slog of some dead writing to get to the interesting concepts. I've never had the pleasure of reading a harcore sci-fi novel that was also an excellently written character drama. The only soft sci-fi book that pulled off the balance and stuck the landing was The Martian.

You did not just slander my boys Asimov and Herbert.

The Godmakers was fantastic.
Foundation is a series where the civilisation itself is the MC.

Also you have to remember at that time, they were mostly just writing short stories, especially Asimov.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure why The Cultural Revolution is supposed to be an alien concept to English readers that goes over their heads but otherwise I tend to agree.

[–] Smokeydope@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Chinese people presumably know what the cultural revolution was about and the subtext is ingrained in social memory. To an English reader with no knowledge of what the cultural revolution was about the books opening has zero context. It begins with a revolutionary girl getting killed and some people lining up to denounce math and science like a public humiliation court but more violent. Theres no subtext as to why these things are happening or what its about. A quick Wikipedia article fixes that context up of it being about the current regime believing academic knowledge would undermine political power and economic worker capability, but thats never explained in the book its expected implicit knowledge your expected to know going in.

Western atrocities and cultural revolutions usually aren't over literal knowledge. For English speakering countries all revolutions and dictatorship genocides are usually about persecution of nationality, race, or religion. Take the american civil war and the Holocaust to example. revolution and state sanctioned violence aren't usually directly over nerd shit like knowledge, theyre fought over ideaology, race, resources. Instead of directly spilling blood and literally burning libraries governments prefer to play the long game of defunding public education and quietly banning controversial books to make the populace stupid and submissive, not literally book burning. 1984 is supposed to be metaphorical extremist dystopian satire warning us about PRISM, five eyes and the survailance state, not a literal instruction manual.

The idea of a book burning society with extreme censorship in such an in-your-face way is presented as fictional because the concept is so ridiculous. No half-stable government in their right mind would be so violently audacious over something so trivial, not even the run of the mill dictatorships. Asian culture is just very different.

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[–] mr_satan@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Now that you mention it, yes. The characters are quite 2 dimensional and unlikeable (not all, but definitely important to mention).

That being said I thoroughly enjoyed the books and didn't stop too much on the characters. Under unlikeable, flat, awkward characters there was an interesting premise and good thinking to be had: living in a society that has no private thoughts; dark forest theory, life in a society after the end.
So what I did was take a big sip of suspension of disbelief and enjoyed the ride. The interest to see the conclusion of the story was enough to coast through all three of the books.

Also, I read those just before the hype. I first heard of the first book a few years before from an Adam Savage podcast and the premise stuck to me. So after reading the Witcher I wanted something sci-fi'ish and this hit the spot.

I agree that the underlying ideas were interesting, but the books had so much padding. So much of the story was just "but wait, it gets worse" that I found it hard to get through at times. I feel like the books could have been half as long and still conveyed the same interesting concepts without losing much.

[–] TheBat@lemmy.world 22 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 18 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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.

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