Overview
The novel opens in the Cultural Revolution: a young astrophysicist watches her father beaten to death by Red Guards for teaching Einstein. Decades later, an aging computer scientist named Wang Miao discovers a virtual-reality game called Three Body, in which players must devise physics that can predict the motion of a planet orbiting three suns. What both threads share, and what the reader gradually realises, is the same shattering answer to a question humanity has just accidentally asked.
Liu writes in a mode most Western hard-SF has abandoned: cold, abstract, philosophical, more interested in ideas than in characters. His people are often thin. His prose (in translation) is austere. But the ideas are staggering. The sophons, the dark forest hypothesis, the dimensional weapon. And they will change how you think about first contact for the rest of your life.
The trilogy escalates. Book 2, The Dark Forest, is the strongest of the three and contains an argument about interstellar civilisation that is one of the most terrifying thought experiments in modern SF. Book 3, Death's End, is longer, weirder, and more divisive. Read all three; expect to prefer the second.
