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.