I have just completed reading all three novels of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, e.g. the Three-Body Problem trilogy. This was an eventual (albeit unlikely) goal I espoused a few weeks ago, but I surprised myself by plowing through all of them in about 7 days. That had not been the plan.

Personally, I blame Bhagpuss. In the comments, he noted:

I got maybe 30 or 40 pages into The Three Body problem before I gave up. Very dull, pedestrian prose, possibly the translation, and a not very interesting storyline.

For triangulation, I read more than one book a week on average and have done pretty consistently since I first learned to read. Of the books I start, I probably fail to finish no more than two or three a year. They have to be *very* dull before I give up on them. This one was that dull.

And with the petulance of (comparative) teenagers everywhere, I thought: How bad could it be?

Insert LarryDavid.gif

To Bhagpuss’ credit, he is correct on all points. I’m not a literature expert, but the books definitely felt like they had discovered a third state of writing: poetry, prose, and then this. I kept at it though, because part of me was trying to figure out why it felt so dull – not in a “where are the good bits” sense, but trying to identify the gap in myself that was not connecting. A big part, undoubtedly, is in the fact the series was written by a Chinese author in the Chinese language for a Chinese audience. Translating works into another language is obviously possible, and although there is some loss thereby, I have read plenty of, say, Camus and Nietzsche (of course) and been deeply appreciative of the subtleties of both the philosophies and the prose itself. Same with the, admittedly fewer, classical Japanese novels I read through in college. Then again, I was specifically taking courses on Japanese literature at the time, so perhaps I was more primed to recognize the stylizations and themes of the text.

Whatever. This was not intended to be a book report for credit, so let me be more direct.

The value of this series exists entirely in the concepts and philosophies that it presents. In the Three-Body Problem, a significant amount of time is spent setting up history and background for completely unlikeable characters. Once the stage is set, the book – and series overall – functionally reads a lot like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series insofar that it is a mystery/thriller novel with hard sci-fi elements. Unfortunately, the author takes great pains in presenting an impossible scenario, spending a lot of time explaining how there is no hope, and then revealing a miraculous solution with zero foreshadowing. That last bit is the key: the solution didn’t exist until it appeared. In a traditional murder mystery, there may be plenty of red herrings, but once revealed, you experience the same “a-ha!” moment of the detective as you trace the threads back to the start. Here, there is no such satisfaction.

Aside from the poor dialog, characterization, overall story structure though? Really good.

To be clear, the 2nd book (The Dark Forest) literally coined a term for a possible solution of the Fermi Paradox. Most of the hard sci-fi elements were extremely intriguing and novel. And even though the “mysteries” were not especially well-structured from a reader point of view, the concepts therein got the juices flowing. It’s a pretty good sign that when I set the final book down, I felt like it was obvious that we shouldn’t be attempting communications with aliens, and also that someone inevitably would try anyway, resulting in our extinction. The philosophical axioms presented seem pretty hard to beat.

I just wish the whole thing was written a bit better. For example, this passage:

Cheng Xin thought she saw exhaustion and laziness in those eyes, but there was also something deeper, something sharp that made her uncomfortable. A smile appeared on Wade’s face, like water seeping out of a crack in the frozen surface of a river; there was no real warmth, and it didn’t relax her.

And this line:

The stories turned into empty baskets capable of carrying any goods.

Those were good! And… those were the only lines I found, coming only in the third book. Compare that to Malazan where I basically filled up a Notepad file full of them with every novel. Again, perhaps something was lost in translation, but with how the books are structured, I kinda doubt it. If you have ever wondered if the “Show, Don’t Tell” principle can be failed in the written word, this series is exhibit A-to-C on how. That works when describing four-dimensional space or the power of strong-attraction weapon technology, but no so much the human drama bits.

Ultimately, while it holds zero-dimensional candles to classics like Dune, I do feel like the Three-Body Problem series is Important sci-fi, with an uppercase I. Whatever you think about, say, Ringworld (1970), it is undeniable that the concepts explored (megastructures) imparted a kind of gravity wave that is still rocking pencils 50+ years later. It remains to be seen how big the ripple Three-Body Problem extends, but I know that I personally will be looking askance at every other sci-fi book if they do not address the “dark forest” inevitability. Just wish the hike to said forest was a bit more entertaining.

P.S. Netflix is releasing a Three-Body Problem show next month, headed up by the Game of Thrones directors (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss). You can watch the trailer here. While what D&D did in Season 8 of Game of Thrones was criminal, at least here the source material is already completed. Indeed, provided the overall concepts explored in the Three-Body Problem remain the same, even a clumsy adaptation would be a huge improvement over the original.