Three Body Problem

[karanguni]

Just wrapped up Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem and that was a bloody fine read. Some really good, thought-provoking bits and baubles of physics – theoretical and applied! – and some of the finest damned description of multi-dimensional thinking I've ever read packed into delicious historical context with lots of sideways look at the progression of science as a social phenomenon. In a sci-fi book! In a sci-fi book! I haven't enjoyed myself this much in ages.

Going to pick up the second book now, and just unwind. It's been a long-ass 2016 already, but... Not bad. Busy, but not bad. Not doing too good on my original/fic writing resolutions, but work is going – well. I can't really internet anymore because I'm so tired coming back from the job, but I think it'll start to... burn in.

I still want to get more social goals fulfilled, but for now? This is... all right. It's been a while since life was... all right.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I tried to read it and bounced off it HARD. Well before I actually got into any of the science bits. The history was kind of interesting, but the characters in the first bit--I couldn't make myself care about them (and I tried), and there was too much random jumping of location and characters, none of which I could get at all interested in, and I was genuinely trying, because I'd heard such good things about it. Then we got into the present-day section, and the detective guy is investigating those scientist deaths or whatever, and none of the motivations they were coming up with made ANY sense or had ANY relation to any scientist or researcher I've ever known, studied, or heard of. I mean, the earlier characters might not have appealed to me, but at least I understood who they were and why they did what they did. At that point, I figured that I'd read enough of it to be able to tell that the things that bugged me were getting worse not better, and so I gave up.

Which was disappointing! I wanted to get to the physics!

[karanguni]

I can see that! The physics and theoretical stuff only got really interesting for me when you hit the mathematician trying to quantitatively solve for the three-body problem and the last last chapter where you get to dimensional folding and unfolding; everything before that was pretty "I could know nothing about physics and just nod along."

The book being in translation is another thing: I read it having done a tiny bit of research/practical translation myself, and so I'm a lot more forgiving of the oddity of the language. Plus my background is in this sort of historical stuff, so it's an auto-win for me.

But definitely a book that you have to read the ABSOLUTE LAST CHAPTER OF to get why ANYTHING in the first n-1 chapters work...

[beatrice_otter]

Well, I like the historical stuff too, that wasn't the problem--it was that it wasn't connecting with anything yet, and I didn't like any of the characters in anything from the historical stuff or the modern stuff.

I read once that the book had been rearranged by the translator--that the original was not in internal chronological order, but differently. And I wonder if the effect I got out of it (irritating progression of randoom events in the lives of random people I don't care about) would have been different if it were arranged in the original way, so we got the connections Liu Cixin was making.

Traduttore tradittore.