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crispycritter 's review for:
The Three-Body Problem
by Cixin Liu
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
This was a tough book for me to rate because I feel very conflicted about it.
What this book did well:
What this book did well:
- Awesome concepts
- Cool science
First contact with a super interesting alien race - With the exception of a big of a slog in the middle, we get some mystery and increasing intensity as we learn more about the 3 Body game and Red Coast Base
What this book did poorly:
- Characters: where were they? I don't even know how you can write such poorly developed characters unless it's on purpose. Seriously, it felt like I was playing a first-person video game as Wang and everyone else was an NPC with a small bank of available responses, no clear motivations, and no distinct personality. I've talked to chatbots with more pizzazz. Da Shi was by far the most interesting character and he was just a borrowed charicature from pulpy criminal procedurals. Ye Wenjie was almost interesting but ended up just being confusing in later parts.
- Subpoint: character dialogue: seriously, who talks like that? At points it read like comedy, making fun of how humans talk to other humans.
Was the dialogue written by a Trisolaran? Silly bugs, flapping their silly mouths at each other. - Subpoint: character motivation:
unilaterally deciding humans are terrible and need 'divine' intervention / annihilation is just . . . not a normal reaction. This was a difficult mental leap for me to make. I just did not relate to Ye sending that second transmission after she'd been warned of the Trisolaran's intentions and I definitely didn't relate to Evans "I love animals a normal amount" and gang.
- Subpoint: character dialogue: seriously, who talks like that? At points it read like comedy, making fun of how humans talk to other humans.
- Prose: the prose was god-awful, yo. And it was weird because there were brief moments where Cixin Liu wrote some really beautiful sentences and I thought ok, you can write well. For the vast majority of the book words like wooden, stilted, and painful come to mind. I have a pretty high tolerance for bad prose (seriously, I read a lot of bad indie books). But ya gotta make me at least care about the characters a little bit. I probably would have given this five stars if we'd had just a smidge more character development.
What I just didn't care for:
- The science descriptions got a big long-winded for me. Parts of this felt like reading nonfiction or a textbook. I respect hard sci fi as a subgenre, but I know it's not my cup of tea. I didn't ding Cixin Liu for the heavy science, just flagging for folks. Some of us want to learn but I'm just here to vibe.