p front: Fantastic book!

I’m not sure how this one showed up on my shelf. I was looking for something to read and found this at the bottom of a pile (actually, I do think I know where it came from). But this is a review, not a confession.

The Three-Body Problem is a story from China by Cixin Liu, one of the greats of Chinese literature. It starts off in our real world, during the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And all that seems normal enough (it its humanically horrible sort of way).

Then we get a strange occurrence with a guy and his camera film (and later his eyes). And then there is a virtual reality game set on about the strangest world you’ll ever image.

So there are all these weird discordant points, things that don’t make sense or are seemingly impossible.

And then, just like that, two of the datapoints join, the perfect “ah hah” moment.

And that’s where this book is brilliant, putting together a narrative that slowly joins the individuals to events that took place in the past to some future horror still unfolding. It was a great book, one that I’m sorry ended. There are two followups – I’ll have to order them.

I will mention this – the author made a very clever non-electrical computer, just about as weird as I did in Early Retyrement. Where I used slaves and beads and a trireme drummer, he used an army group. That, alone, was worth the read.

Anyway, I don’t know what else I can tell you on this one – superb book. If you like your Science Fiction really out there on the cutting edge (and not StarWars franchise crap), get this book!

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