The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

ISBN: 9781800246683
Amazon ID: B00S8FCJCQ

This seems like a pretty reasonable science-fiction story, provided you can overlook the excessive quantity of Chinese communist socialist political oppression and interference with the science (and the scientists).

This is the first book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

The title, and much of the story, is based on a genuine and well-known mathematical problem:

• predicting the path of an object in free space is trivial - thank you, Sir Isaac
• predicting the paths of two objects in free space is not much harder (I'm assuming here that the two objects are close enough and massive enough to have a gravitational influence upon each other, otherwise they're just two independent objects in free space each following their own path) - congratulations, Pierre-Simon, you can foretell the universe, provided it is this simple
• predicting the paths of three objects (again, assuming they are close enough and massive enough each to have gravitational influences upon the others) is impossible

This means that:

• a planet orbiting a sun can predict what its days and seasons will be like.
• a planet orbiting two suns (which, of course, orbit each other) can predict what its days will be like, but the seasons will be a little more complicated (however, still predictable).
• a planet orbiting three suns (orbiting each other) essentially has no chance of working out what's going to happen next.

Now, the author is Chinese, and seems to be in agreement with the current Chinese communist socialist political attitudes of oppression, but these really aren't necessary to the story, and for anyone outside of China, they're simply distracting at best and offensively irritating at worst (I don't want to read a science fiction story and end up feeling like I want to travel to another continent and give the government a good talking to about social decency, personal freedom and individual expression).

So, if you like Chinese communism and science fiction, this is a great book for you.

If you enjoy only one of those, be prepared to have to overlook the other as you read this book.

Somewhere between 50% and 75% of the way through the book, the real story gets underway, and there's inventive use of nanomaterials as well as pretty advanced discussion of subatomic particle structure. Once you get past the communism, it's definitely good science fiction.

I like the fact that it's an interesting mixture of science, from astronomy and chaos theory to quantum particle physics.

I don't like the fact that the book stops without coming to an end. Okay, so it is the first part of a trilogy, but it should still have a better conclusion in its own right than it does.

It's alright as a book. The science fiction is good; the communist socialism is overdone and detracts from the story; and it doesn't really have an ending.

As it's the first part of a trilogy, the Remembrance of Earth's Past, I shall consider reading the next part (I'm optimistically hoping that since most of the communism was at the start of the first book, the author doesn't feel much need to continue with it in the second), however I'm certainly going to wait until Amazon has the next book/s at a lower price (they're currently five times more expensive than the first book was).

Note: several weeks later, the second book, The Dark Forest, became available at a reasonable price.

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