The Three-Body Problem

Right of the bat, I want to give big praise to the translator of this book, Bojan Tarabić. I read it in my native language (Serbian) and the choice of words had me reaching for the dictionary quite a few times. I don't know if it was an artistic choice of the translator or a stylistic imitation of the original to use such unorthodox phrasing and wording but it strongly elevated my reading experience.

That being said, this was a awful book. I could understand the one-dimensional characters, pasing issues and the messy narrative structure if the ideas were at least presented in a meaningful way. But they are not. They are dry exposition dumps that are no more exciting than reading a physics textbook. And they are delivered in a very non-organic way where the whole story is interrupted just so the author can take a few pages to explain a concept. They concepts are not organically woven into the story.

I had no idea what to expect when I started reading. The opening had me hooked. Science community during the Chinese cultural revolution. Sounds exciting. Certainly novel to me. But then it goes to a present day murder mystery. Which turns into a sci-fi mystery with the countdown (which gets completely abandoned) Then there is the video game which helps introduce the alien race. And after the video game is finished it's just meanders from one info dump and character back-story to another with eye-rolling plot conveniences, interruptered only once for that boat-cutting "action" scene. Even though digestable, interesting sci-fi concepts does not a good story make.

This whole book is just clumsy introduction with fascinating concepts and one interesting character (the cop). Someone else wrote this, but I could read a book just about the adventures of Da Shi. I am very hesitant about continuing with this series. And I've grown tired of people telling me to endure the first book because everything improves with later installments. If the author wanted me to continue, they should've written a more compelling first novel. Nowadays we get these thousand+ page monstrocities that are divided into three parts and we are asked to blindly trust that things will get better as the story progresses. I'm not sold.