I had a two-fold interest in reading this book/series;
- I had seen the Netflix film series advertised, but I like reading the book version first before watching the film version of ANY story, so I obtained the first book in the series to read.
- I have begun exploring international writers and thought a book by a Chinese author would be interesting and provide different perspectives from American authors.
Here’s the blurb for the first book:
“Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.”
I had high hopes, based on the description above, for “The Three-Body Problem” but those hopes were dashed on the rocks of a very disappointing piece of writing. The plot is one that should work, but the characters and dialog doom this work.
The characters are like cardboard cutouts with no real depth to them. They are all simply there to fill a space and they are all nothing more than placeholders. Flat and uninteresting. Even the most interesting character, Da Shi, is still just a caricature of his role.
The dialog is, for the most part, stilted and empty. It sounds like a child wrote it. At first I thought it might be the effects of the translation from Chinese to English…that something was lost in the translation. But after plodding through this mess I’m convinced the original author simply does not know how real people speak to each other. There is never anything that shines through as authentic dialog.
I really wanted to like this book and went into it with positive expectations. When I reached about a third of the way through the book I was ready to stop the torture of reading it, but I decided to keep going so I could say with a clear conscience that I gave it a complete effort. And I hoped it might improve in its delivery. Now I wish that I had not bothered.
This is the first book of a trilogy. Needless to say, I won’t be finishing the series and gave this book one star.
I might still give the Netflix production a try in the hopes that they are able to take this dross and turn it into something worthwhile.
But it’s going to probably be a while before I get the bad taste of “The Three-Body Problem” out of my head.
