Thursday, February 5, 2015

The Three-Body Problem

(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)

Book Jacket for: The three-body problemThe 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.