The Three-Body Problem

tldr: Save your money. The core idea of an alien race using humans to conquer humanity is not new, but can still be entertaining. Unfortunately, this book is written like budget quality fan fiction. If it had been posted as a serialized story on Reddit I'd be impressed, but a novel that has been hyped this much and turned into a series? I don't get the enthusiasm. This isn't a problem of translation; it's structural. The characters are flat, unchanging cliches, the story itself is clunky at best, the settings make no sense (everyone import happens to be in the same place and already largely know one another), the characters' actions are overblown and don't make sense, and worst of all it's just boring. There is no reason to care about the people in the book. "Hey, here's a bad guy who is bad for ideological reasons but otherwise largely unmentioned. Oh no, an unnamed pixie walked up to him and snapped his neck like an 80s action hero.". It's grade-C at best.

Perhaps it's merely the stylistic choices in the translation, but this book reads particularly stilted, and it does not add to the work. Indeed, Ken Liu has stated that he wanted to preserve the feeling of cultural disorientation with the translation, so made it deliberately more difficult to read. This would be forgivable if it added anything, but it really doesn't.

It didn't take long to know this wasn't for me. I found it read like a disturbed teenagers expression of half-baked ideas and narratives. the basic principle of story telling of "show don't say" is not applied here. "Felt the presence of iron ovens like iron to a magnet".... "A beautiful 15 year old girl..." the proceed to describe here body gruesomely. The criticism of this story is warranted.