A complex story that relies on science and world building, The Three-Body Problem is easily the most captivating SciFi novel I've read in a long time. If the reader is willing to allow that many things in the book will not be clear until the very end, then this book will captivate easily. It is not only an excellent work of SciFi (heavy on the Sci) but also an interesting look at China both currently and historically. I felt very much like I was back in China while reading a lot of this. It's something cultural that is difficult to put into words. The characters may appear flat at first but in reality they have rich complexity. In a western novel these characters would behave differently, would play different roles. But in the context of China the behavior is not only perfectly understandable but so realistic as to paint vivid pictures of each person in my brain.

Liu CiXin does not assume that the reader is as familiar with many of the theoretical scientific ideas as he is, making most of the science easy enough for even a humanities major like myself to understand. There are ideas in this book that are extraordinarily complex, things that I struggle even now to wrap my brain around, but this does not diminish the novel nor does it make the reader feel inferior for not understanding. The lack of understand is, indeed, at the very heart of what this novel is about.

It's been a long times since I've felt as strongly about a book as I do about this one. The one thing that scares me is that I do not know that I want a sequel, although I know one already exists. I'm sure a sequel would be very good, but this story is so whole and completely already, I fear that the sequel will not live up to my now very high expectations for Liu's work.