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A review by octavia_cade
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
It's always a slightly odd experience reading a book after you've seen the film (or in this case the series) that resulted from it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I prefer the book. In this case, I preferred the series. That doesn't mean I don't think the book's good. It's excellent. It's just different. It's one of those very cerebral pieces of science fiction that is intellectually fascinating, but which - for me, at least - falls down a little on the emotion side. I barely feel anything for these characters; I am, however, fascinated by the idea of a civilisation that has to constantly rebuild itself out of chaos. The one doesn't compensate for the other, though, so in that way it feels a little unbalanced as a story, although on another level that could be my own bias speaking. As a biologist, this story's full of physicists, and that's just not where my science love lies. There also seems a lot of biological issues here that just aren't explored all that well, or at all - how is the Trisolaris microbiome going to deal with a completely alien ecology, for instance?
Maybe that'll come up in the sequels. I'm curious, and I'll definitely be reading them.
Maybe that'll come up in the sequels. I'm curious, and I'll definitely be reading them.