The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu.

1. I really appreciate the way Liu deals with video games. Instead of some starry-eyed, over-the-top, unnecessary and long description of the game-world as an unknowable pseudo-fantasy-land, he describes it the same way he describes spaces in the physical world: as a place the character is experiencing for the first time. It’s not this special, magical place whose description shows only that the author clearly doesn’t understand how humans interact with games; but an honest, down-to-earth portrayal of a video game. His descriptions are William Gibson-esque in approaching the game-world like the character approaches any other space. Instead of mysticism, Liu describes the video game world for why it’s interesting. For instance, the world is initially esoteric, so the descriptions are. But the character views video games as mundane, a known part of the world, so the descriptions of it are mundane. Also, the VR tech is just a matter of course, not a life-altering wonder-tech: it’s a mundane technology in a mundane world. You know, like the world Liu has created is actually real with real people in it: the technology is used, not revered. This is not some shiny new world, but it’s a world populated by real people and real objects and the relationships the character has to the world feel true and honest. This is refreshing and important to remember.

2. My biggest complaint is a tendency in the writing to ham-fist things, which feels insulting to the reader. For instance, when Wang talks to Shen, it’s clearly shown who she is through how she interacts with others. However, later he decides to describe these aspects of her character. He starts with the beautiful telling-phrase, “She spoke like a telegraph—”. This confirms what I already knew with a novel phrase—a great tactic. However, he goes on: “and gave him the impression that she was always extremely cold.” Okay, now that's just redundant. But he doesn’t end there: he keeps hammering the point home through four more long sentences that feel like he’s belaboring the point unnecessarily because he doesn’t believe the reader understands yet. Sure, the C-Prompt analogy is a beautiful one, but it’s too much. This tendency is annoying throughout. He tells well, he just tells too much. Other than this ham-fisting, the writing seems passable, but in translation it’s impossible to judge writing much beyond that.

3. Liu starts the story with one of my least-favorite moves: beginning with a murder before the reader has been given a chance to care about anything yet. I don’t yet care about the world, any characters, or the plot by the time the first murder has occurred. This is difficult for me because it’s such a cliche in speculative fiction right now. It seems like three-quarters of the novels I buy that are from the last five years start with a dead body. This one though, it starts with not just one death, but three! Is this a pun on the title, which is the famous physics-problem and what the plot of the book revolves around? Anyways, he later tries to tie in two of these murders to the life of Wenjie, one of the two main characters. I think these murders try to drive home his perspective on the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. But he does this much more effectively later through showing some specifics that relate to the characters and themes the reader already knows and cares about. These later instances of showing are more effective because the reader is invested, not because he shows better. However, he does show quite well.

4. Structurally, I’m confused. And I don’t know how much of my confusion is from translational ambiguity, unknown differences in narrative traditions between Western and Chinese stories, or this tale itself being told poorly. Primarily, I think I'm confused at the pace of information and the pauses between the first instance and the explanation:
—One example is the countdown, experienced in the first hundred pages, then explained in the last-hundred pages of this four-hundred page book. This is a long wait for what seems a minor plot point. It attempts to set up mystery, but missed that for me by being seemingly dropped and not mentioned again until the end. Only after I got to the second explanation did I realize that I should have been feeling mystery over this throughout. It initially felt like Liu didn't know where he was going.
—Another example is that the ETO is explained as a two-faction group throughout, until about the 300 page mark, when a third faction suddenly appears, and is promptly dropped in a way that billboards a sequel.
—My third example is that Liu often reveals something ambiguously, “Physics doesn’t exist,” then seemingly drops it until five to ten pages later when he gives some exposition, then again until a couple of hundred pages later when he reveals more about this concept. This adds confusion to the story. I’m already confused because the story is paced oddly, and this extra confusion doesn’t add any more mystery, but raises questions in my mind as to whether the author knows where he’s going. I assumed he did and read on, believing that by the end my understanding would come.
And it did satisfactorily. This shaped up by the end into a rather interesting tale. But those early struggles obscured important revelations and aspects of the world and plot for me. The translator, Ken Liu, states in his translator’s notes, “The Chinese literary tradition was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect. In some cases, I tried to adjust the narrative techniques to ones that American readers are more familiar with. In other cases, I’ve left them alone, believing that it’s better to retain the flavor of the original.” At the end, I can’t tell which portions of the novel are either of these techniques. Ken Liu is a good writer on his own, so I can’t blame all my struggles on his translation. I believe this question to be unanswerable by me. Perhaps what Kim Stanley Robinson says on the cover is most informative here: “familiar but strange all at the same time.” I can agree with that. But I still don’t know how much of my confusion is from which of these three issues.

5. The themes of the novel are human interactions and possible responses to the existence of aliens. This is explained fully and concisely in the author’s postscript, where he talks about how humans should be more friendly to each other and all life on their planet, and less optimistic about aliens. And I believe Liu nailed this theme. So, despite the structural confusions I experienced and annoyance I felt at the writing’s redundancy, this is a successful novel in that it communicates its point clearly and adequately, while telling an interesting and engaging story. But in this theme, he doesn’t ever lose sight of the human aspect and delve into what makes Wenjie, Wang, and Shi tick. He delves into their psychology effectively. This melding of alien and human interactions is well-done.

6. This novel is also hard science fiction, and Liu does a good job of explaining these physics concepts and what makes them interesting. I came away from this book with a deeper understanding of the three-body problem in physics. But the novel is wonderfully diverse in the number of science topics it discusses, giving them all an introductory treatment instead of a deep exploration of one theory. Liu does a good job of explaining these through focusing on the interesting aspects and using these properties in the story to show understandable examples of the physics theories discussed. This is effective and separates his writing from a textbook’s.

7. In all, this novel is well-written. Despite spending half the book or more telling people who asked, “I don’t yet know what it’s about, or who the main character is.” I eventually believed, “but I think he knows where he’s going and those last fifty pages are going to be super-important and dense.” And they were. I think almost everything tied back in by the end. It was done in an interesting way and it led to an interesting conclusion—it illuminated that wonderful theme through showing. In short, this strange novel all works out in the end, it makes sense by the end, but it requires a lot from the reader due to its strangeness. It ain’t a bad book, but I am still slightly bemused. And I'm not sure it's in the good way.