(Warning I intend to
give away more regarding the plot of this book then I usually do in
reviews. I do recommend it so if you
like SF from an entirely different cultural perspective you’ll love this book
--- pick it up & don’t read the rest of the review)
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu, is the first in a science fiction
trilogy. At the most basic level it is
traditional story of alien invasion.
What makes it different, and at least to me very interesting, is that
Liu is Chinese and the books were originally published in China so we have an
entirely different cultural take on that story.
The translator does a very good job of making sure the reader is
cognizant of the cultural/historical significance of things mentioned in the
book that the author assumes his audience already knows via in text explanation
& judicious use of footnote.
In this book a scientist, who had seen her father --- also a
scientist --- killed during the Cultural Revolution and who herself had been
sent to do manual labor finds herself, eventually, working on a base that was
focused on SETI. As a political undesirable
she had no power but as an intelligent scientist she found more than expected. She figured out and surreptitiously used a
method to boost the signal of the broadcast they were making and then replied to the answer that is received. She
manages, through a judicial murder, to keep things under wraps and the whole
communication with aliens moves underground into a cadre of scientists
determined to collude with the aliens who’d like to see Earth depopulated so
they can use it for themselves. I will
admit this part struck me a little strangely since people tend to side with
people over anything else so I couldn’t really see why people would pick aliens
over humanity. The author, though, made
all the scientists and others involved in this conspiracy part of a disaffected
class. In China they were people who had
been hard done by in the Cultural Revolution.
Elsewhere in the world they were people who saw what humanity was doing
to the world, thought that it was bad, and assumed a space faring race would be
better. Toward the end of the book
normal people (i.e. those who would pick humanity over any alien) step in and
the war begins. This is only the first
book of the trilogy so it kind of ends right there with the gearing up
beginning. It will be interesting to see
where this goes.
The author claims in the endnotes that the story is in no
way political but it does read that way to me a bit. After all the whole thing is kind of set off
in consequence to how classes of people were treated during a turbulent period
in Chinese history.
All in all an interesting book, give it a try.
Steven Gould continues his excellent Jumper series with Exo. This book focuses on Cent, the second generation in a family of people who can teleport. Cent has suffered romantic disappointment and so turns her not inconsiderable talent and attention to the question of using her abilities to get into space. She recruits people who can help (clearly she’ll need a space suit of some kind for example) and in no time at all cracks the problem. In the meantime her family continues to battle against a cadre of villains, whose overall motivation beyond some kind of weird revenge is unclear, and copes with the age related illness suffered by Cent’s grandmother. 
