Three Body Problem -- Arghhhh!

[lydy]

So, anybody else really unhappy with this much touted novel? Finished it today, and am so very frustrated. It doesn't go below No Award, but really, I was hoping for so much better.

Will talk to anyone who wants to talk in comments. Spoilers a-ok in comments.

Arghhh.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I was decidedly meh about it, yeah. I found the passages inside the game pretty tedious. The ending, well, it pretty clearly marks the book as part of a trilogy -- it's not really an ending at all. But really what I found least satisfying about the book was the overall lack of emotional affect. The various characters feel disconnected, almost disembodied: cool, remote, untouched. In Ye it's understandable, indeed necessary to her character or she would never have betrayed her entire species, but all the others feel that way to me too. Whatever emoting they do seems rote, and unfelt.

In some ways, I found the passages about the Cultural Revolution the most involving -- being historical, they had a more lived-in feel than the rest. The period was certainly bloodier than I realized, but that, as far as I can tell, is true of virtually any period in Chinese history you might want to name. I'm currently reading Autumn In the Heavenly Kingdom, a history of the Taiping Rebellion that integrates the Western and Chinese takes on events, and holy cow, that was huge. The largest civil conflict ever waged on the planet, and if you hear about it in school it's a bare mention as you trundle through the tedium of US 19th C. history.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that lack of emotional affect is, in part, also a legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Are there entire generations of Chinese suffering from PTSD? But yeah, hard to relate to any of the people. When Ye kills her husband and her boss, her lack of emotion seems very odd. And her relationship to her daughter is...it seems badly drawn. There should be more or less emotion, more or less involvement, somehow.

The various suicides. I kinda skimmed the last 10% of the novel, but I assume they were because the scientists were getting scary irrational results because of the intelligent protons? That seems weird and wrong, too. I mean, one guy whose entire theory of the universe goes up in smoke, sure, but a rash? And I believe some Westerners not just Chinese? How does that even work? Emotionally, I mean.

The two side of the Trisolarian fan club seem to be unrealistically monolithic. There should have been more factions, more complexity. The author is right, the advent of a new intelligent species would be transformative. But people are, I think, far weirder than he is giving them credit for.

[soon_lee]

I have read a (very) limited number of Chinese fiction in translation and that lack of emotional affect is not uncommon, so that didn't bother me.

The middle sagged but I did enjoy the beginning & the end. My main problem with it was that it dropped me out of the narrative too many times to deserve my top spot:
- the scientists suiciding was not believable.
- the monomolecular wire sequence had my eyes rolling
- the etching of circuitry onto a proton I don't believe is theoretically possible.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, all those suicides seemed implausible to me. Some, yes, maybe, but especially among younger scientists, of a certain personality type, I would expect a wider variety of responses, including digging in and declaring, "I am going to figure this shit out!" And yep, yep, the Trisolaran fifth column much too cohesive and simplistic in structure -- especially ironic in a book that starts off with the outright battles between various competing factions of Red Guards. You'd expect a comparable mess of the Trisolaran People's Front warring with the People's Front of Trisolaris, all bagging on the Popular Front of Trisolaris, Synod of 1856, and so on. Not to mention sub-factions by national origin. So yeah, weirder than that.

And yeah, the implausibility of an intelligent species arising on Trisolaris at all, let alone somehow restarting civilization over and over, under conditions when the planetary surface is periodically burned to a cinder, intruded from time to time.