The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem (三体 / sān tǐ) is a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin. It was recommended to me on Reddit when I mentioned Blindsight by Peter Watts. The redditor in question said Blindsight had been the most significant scifi book they had read until The Three-Body Problem trilogy -- or Remembrance of Earth's Past as it's officially called. That was enough of a recommendation for me to check it out.

After the first book, I wouldn't put it above Blindsight yet myself. It was intriguing enough that I already borrowed the second one but Blindsight was so full of ideas based on scientific research that a fairly light scifi mystery can't really compete with it. I'm also not a huge fan of "abstractness" which in this book happens whenever the protagonist, nanotechnology researcher Wang Miao plays a virtual reality video game that is essentially about solving the physics problem which the novel is named after.

The Three-Body Problem is very Chinese. Not surprising, given the author, but I found it delightful in an oddly familiar manner: I had never read a book by a Chinese author before but I have seen a number of Chinese movies and I had easy time picturing how the characters acted and looked like. My favorite character was Shi "Big Shi" Qiang, an ill-mannered detective and counter-terrorism specialist. He's such a caricature and his relationship with Wang develops in such a predictable fashion. One could consider it weak characterization -- which is typical for science fiction -- but I personally found it charming.

The novel begins in the 1960s during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For a good while into the book I was perplexed what the beginning had to do with anything other than the author feeling the need to bring up the suffering of Chinese intellectuals during that time. But eventually I figured out that it was creating a base and reasoning on the actions of the book's other protagonist, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie.

In the novel's 2000s, Wang Miao is pulled into an investigation about an odd series of scientist suicides. It seems someone or something is attacking humanity's capability to do science: a war has begun.

One thing Liu does truly masterfully is how the novel is structured; how everything is brought together into a wholeness-dripping package. It carries its mystery into a satisfying conclusion and leaves one wanting for more. The story reminded me very much of Arthur C. Clarke's works -- and I'm not the only one who got that impression: Clarke is mentioned in about every review of the book.

I read the novel in Finnish even though the library would have also had the English translation by Ken Liu which is apparently good enough to have been awarded for its high quality. I ended up choosing the Finnish one because I had happened to glance at a Finnish blog post which, among other things, compared the translations and came to the conclusion that the Finnish one by Rauno Sainio is more faithful to the original text.

Apparently Ken Liu used a lot of clarifying footnotes while Sainio was more subtle by embedding the clarifications into the text. The one time Saunio had to resort to using a footnote was when Liu Cixin had made up a word by replacing the first character in the Chinese word for proton (or was it neutron?) with one that is pronounced identically but carries the meaning of 'wisdom' instead of whatever the normal one does. Ken Liu translated it into 'sophon' -- a sophisticated proton? I'm almost certain that Saunio had translated it to "smart proton" or something but I already returned the book and can't check. In the following book Saunio seems to have used 'sofoni'. Maybe he became aware of Ken Liu's translation and followed suit. Or maybe I'm misremembering and it was sofoni from the start.

One thing missing form the Finnish print is an afterword Liu Cixin wrote for the English one. I would have liked to read that.