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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[–] Getting6409@piefed.ee 4 points 3 days ago

I definitely found many, maybe even most of the characters bordering on comically corny. But i hadn't read anything like it regarding the core stories and concepts, and those got the hooks in me. Maybe for a bit i was holding my nose to keep moving through the story, but at some point i just didnt care and had to read all three books, and in the end they're still a dear favorite. If the underlying story isn't doing it for you, you're only crazy if you force yourself to keep reading it.

[–] RBWells@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

I liked the Chinese tv adaptation, didn't read the book, and won't watch the American version. I think the series was good largely because of the actors, not so much the plot.

[–] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I understand this community is about books, but I’m curious if anyone here who read this book also watched the Netflix series?

If so, do you hold a different opinion of the show?

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

The Netflix series felt very different then the book. I found the mystery aspect in the first part of the book the most interesting, but the show completely skipped it. So the show wasn't bad but I was still disappointed.

[–] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah I can understand that. I liked Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies a lot, but there were some big differences between them and the books that I wished had been different. Tom Bombadil, for instance.

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[–] MisterCurtis@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

Yeah. I struggled with the cringy romance sections. Very much a freshman entry. But the series as a whole does work well. The Dark Forest is huge improvement. it also had a different translator and has a different structure that I feel works better than the first.

[–] Wolf314159@startrek.website -3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is a failure of the reader, not the literature. It's science fiction space opera written from the cultural perspective completely alien to most western sci-fi literature. It's absolutely nothing like H.G. Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge, Herbert, Heinlein, or Niven. The Three Body Problem is almost the antithesis of all of those manifest destiny individual heroes. All of those authors have much more alike amongst themselves than they do with the narrative history we read through The Three Body Problem. Of course a lot of western readers don't like it, it wasn't written for their perspective. I don't even think I could really get into it enough to REALLY enjoy it as much as my "comfort food" sci-fi. But, I could tell their was something there, and it was my own limitation of understanding, not a failure of the literature or the translation.

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[–] HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I thought it sucked ass too. Supposedly the second and third books are better.

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[–] truthfultemporarily@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago

I believe its the authors first book. It gets significantly better.

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