The Three-Body Problem

During my years of reading RA favorite books, I have only made this mistake once before…. Reading the wrong book, though the right title.  I read The Three-Body Problem, a book on physics and classical mechanics, yes a text book, and fortunately my assistant emailed me saying, wrong book!  So I went to the book store and found the right version, this one by Cixin Liu and translated from Chinese into English by Ken Liu.  It is a best-seller from China and my first Sci-fi from that country.  The story mixes communist rule, religion vs. evolution, and extra-terrestrial beings.  There are two main characters, a young male scientist (Wang) who is searching for answers once he is introduced to the online game “Three-body problem,” which brings players into a new world, a world where it is freezing cold or sweltering hot.  Wang believes he has the answer to the mystery of the game, but in finding it he is led to an older scientist, the second main character, Weinje.  She is the daughter of a famous professor.  The first part of the book shares Weinje’s early life during the height of communist rule in the 1970s and how she witnessed the uprising of intellectuals and how her own father was killed educating middle-class college students.  Weinje then gets in trouble with the authorities for making notes on a book and is offered imprisonment or be sent to an undercover mission that finds the government communicating with aliens!  Fast forward thirty years and Wang encounters Weinje as he is thrust to identify how to solve the game as the clock for the end of the world (or Wang’s life to end) is moving downward.  What happens when Wang meets Weinje?  What information does she have from her ten year work with the governmental base communicating with a world far from ours?  The author does a great job foreshadowing what is to come and using Weinje’s early life as the background for how the two lives intersect.   Great story utilizing gaming, aliens, communism, and the Cultural Revolution within China.  This is a modern day sci-fi, which you don’t find often.  Great translation, nothing lost in it.  I would highly recommend this one, not the other Three-Body Problem!  I enjoyed it and all of the twists.