The Three-Body Problem

...one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written ... The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research ... New technology and the science behind it are always well explained (though never boringly) by Cixin. The best bits in his books are set pieces that would be hallucinatory, or surreal, were it not that everything is described with such scientific authority ... Cixin’s view of the universe as a dark forest may be pessimistic, but his view of humanity and its future is extremely optimistic. We are not in the end times: we are babies at the foot of a long staircase. We will develop superhard nanomaterials that will allow us to build an elevator to space. We will develop rockets powered by nuclear fusion that will take us way beyond the Oort cloud. One day we will be capable of building ring-shaped artificial planets that produce their own gravitational fields. We will live in houses shaped like leaves that dangle from the branches of enormous artificial trees; we won’t carry mobile phones or smart devices since any surface can be turned into an information screen at will. Cixin constantly reminds us of our technological infancy by imagining civilisations that are way ahead of us, lighting the path.

...China has a thriving science fiction scene, and Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem is stunning, elegant proof ... it transcends expectation — not to mention borders ... The Three-Body Problem turns a boilerplate, first-contact concept into something absolutely mind-unfolding. ... The way the book's alien race seeks to assert its presence on Earth is nothing short of awe-inspiring ... This is hard SF, full of lovingly lengthy passages of technical exposition about everything from quantum mechanics to artificial intelligence. But Cixin Liu supports all of that braintwisting theory with empathetic characters and a strong action-thriller backbone ... while Ken Liu's translation is clear, tasteful, and lyrical, there's a lot of exposition to chew on. It's worth every ounce of effort. The book's well-earned suspense hinges on moral dilemmas that resonate far beyond its nationality or even its heady, abstract physics ... If The Three-Body Problem...helps bridge the gap between Eastern and Western SF, it will have performed a great duty for the literary world. But as a science-fiction epic of the most profound kind, it's already won.

Cixin Liu is the champion of Chinese sci-fi, and his The Three-Body Problem... is The War of the Worlds for the 21st century ... What makes Mr. Liu’s novel different from its Western competitors in the alien-invasion line is not its hardware (though it is full of strange ideas, like how to construct a human computer using 30 million people, each with a white and a black flag ...The difference seems to be a kind of patience, seeing things long-term ... One can’t fault the ambition, nor the still-unshaken conviction in the powers of science. Sci-fi fans often boast about their favorite genre’s diversity and universality. Now they have a classic example to point to. Not a page-turner, but packed with a sense of wonder, coupled to human experiences few of us have had to face.