SFF

The Three-Body Problem

by Cixin Liu
Tor. (Three Body, Bk. 1). Nov. 2014. 336p. tr. from Chinese by Ken Liu. ISBN 9780765377067. $29.99; ebk. ISBN 9781466853447. SF
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During China's cultural revolution of the 1960s, a woman who is a political undesirable finds purpose at a secret military base that is sending signals into space to communicate with an alien culture. Years later, a video game called Three Body may hold the key to what those aliens want from Earth, and a physicist gets pulled into a worldwide effort to prepare for their arrival.
VERDICT This 2006 Chinese best seller finally gets an English translation from Nebula and Hugo Award winner and author Ken Liu. Along with the unusual setting, the novel includes a lot of discussions of high-level physics (sometimes helpfully couched within the video game), as the aliens come from a world with three suns and the unpredictable motions of the trisolaran system threaten their continued existence. It's not an easy sell to Western readers, but the translator provides helpful footnotes explaining the unfamiliar historical and cultural references. Fans of hard sf likened to the work of Arthur C. Clarke will look forward to the rest of the series. [See Eric Norton's sf/fantasy feature, "A Multiplicity of Realms," LJ 8/14.]
Reviewed by Megan M. McArdle , Oct 15, 2014
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