Novel Review: Liu Cixin - The Three-Body Problem (2008)

Finally finished this , quite late considering I got it as a gift a few years back. I'm talking about the English translation, by the way.

Quite the puzzling novel, from a critics' point of view, because it's very uneven. I'll make it simple using a good ol' list:

• Plot: the best part, it was riveting for me. That is until the last dozens of page (see further).
• Universe: talking about Trisolaris, obviously pretty interesting!
• Characters: wooden, as if everyone had autism. The dirty cop parody was the only interesting one here.
• Style: terse and devoid of life, almost a logbook. Very jarring when your previous novel was a Pratchett. Better than unwelcome and/or badly written flourishes, at least the plot didn't get bogged down. NB: I don't know how much is due to the translation, though.

Now for two more precise bugbears: first, that ending that goes completely banana, and not in a good way. Getting near the worst examples of fictional self-indulgence I can think of, like 2001: A Space Odyssey's closing acid trip or the bad "shifting" prose of Nine Princes in Amber.

And second: the technobabble and "sciencey" references are often hamfisted, probably to woo the Reddit and Hugo Award crowd. Maybe it looks worse than it is when you have a pretty wide scientific knowledge (yep, talking about myself).

When it came to giving the whole a rating, I definitely wavered between 6 and 7. But I felt like being nice and had a good leftover impression, so yeah. Not sure I'm going to read the rest of the trilogy, though.