The Three Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

I had seen the Netflix adaptation of this book, before i read it. When i heard of the show, I had no idea that it was science fiction - in fact i thought it was some sort of a mystery/ detective series (duh). I did enjoy the show though there were loose ends for me and hence I wanted to read the book. 

The Three Body Problem is science fiction without any green men, space ships whizzing across space, galaxies to be saved by super heroes who pass snarky comments while also working together to save humanity. So zero fantastical elements and only hard physics with actual physicists and scientists who have to figure out how to save the world that shows signs of possibly being invaded 450 years later by beings that possess higher intelligence and humanity being wiped out in that near future! And a set of scientists and rational people working with them, because they genuinely believe that human beings are the worst enemies of each other and possibly deserve to be wiped out and be replaced by a race of superior, more evolved beings.

The book works in two time lines - one is the 1960s at the peak of the cultural revolution in China, when anything could be declared against the government, and the person could be hounded and destroyed (I’m not sure its not the same today under all governments everywhere, but whatever). So the young Ye Wenjie, a budding Physicists with great potential, watches helplessly as her scientist father Ye Zhetai  beaten to death in a public spectacle. This follows a few years of hard labour for her in the cold regions of the Greater Khinghan Mountains. On the verge of harder punishment or even death as a traitor, she is rescued by an ex student of her father and put in a high security facility where some top secret experiments are being performed. Slowly, she build trust with the people and, given her background and prior research in Theoretical Physics, she becomes privy to the exact nature and reason for the facility. 

The other timeline is the present day China, where Wang Miao, a Nanomaterials researcher, out of the blue, gets summoned for a top secret meeting where he is told that reputed and esteemed scientists seem to be getting killed (or committing suicide) and something fishy to the power of infinity is happening that has the potential to end the world. Whoever or whatever is behind the mysterious killings also wants Wang Miao to stop the research in nano materials or else face the same fate as the other scientists. He also gets invited to play an AR/VR game that takes him to a world that has the Three Body Problem. The physics behind this problem had me mind blown and I will not say more about it here. What follows is a race against time to understand what the earth is dealing with, who is betraying the human race and how can this be stopped. The thread from the 1960s is also brought forth and merged and the implications of the actions taken then, coming full circle in the present. While this book ends with a temporary solution to the Three Body Problem, there is more to be done to save mankind in the distant future, for which i will read the other two books in this series.

Not competent to comment on it, I cannot say how accurate the Physics in the book is, but in terms of sounding legit, it does a good job. At the core level, I could understand what they were grappling with and it made for a very very interesting read. Much better than little green men with evil intentions could have! The human angles are not overdone, but kept just enough to keep it interesting, with the police detective Da Shi bringing in the devil-may-care common man swag. It is great to see scientists and researchers being given centre stage and the value of the work they do brought to the fore in this book, in an exciting race against time setting. 

 On the negative side, the pace slackens in place and the explanations in the Virtual Reality game become tedious. If you like getting a bit of historical context with some science humour thrown in, you should be good even there.