A friend of mine recently recommended that I read this book, as he told me it was one of the best science-fiction novels he had ever read. This book is another foreign work I really enjoyed, and it served, in my opinion as a more modern version of War of the Worlds by H.G Wells.

Initially, the story starts in the past, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution during 1967. one of the protagonists, Ye Wenjie, sees the death of her father at the hands of the revolutionaries, and she gets sent to inner Mongolia as part of a labor brigade and later sentenced to prison. However, two military physicists from the government see an opportunity in her and recruit her to conduct secretive research in the Red Coast project, which was intended to develop technologies that could be used to damage spy satellites from rival countries, reminiscent of the Cold War era this part of the story is set in.

However, Wenjie later learns about the truth behind the project, and realizes that the project’s true intention is to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. She inevitably finds evidence of an alien civilization, Trisolaris, and receives a message from a Trisolarian listener to not respond, as their civilization was constantly under the uncertainty that their planet may be engulfed by their sun. However, the specifics behind this is not revealed until much later in the novel.

Meanwhile, in the present, Wang Miao, a scientist in the field of nanotechnology, finds a game named “Three-Body”, played using virtual reality hardware known as V-suits. this game has the users go through a series of eras and challenges. However, a shocking truth is later discovered about the game, which I will not reveal.

Overall, this was a great book in my opinion, and I really liked how unlike a lot of the science-fiction novels I’ve read, a lot of the fictional work is grounded in reality, hence this book being under the genre of hard science-fiction. I really enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in physics, or just anybody who just wants to read novel that actually requires a bit of thinking to get.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is available to check out from the Mission Viejo Library. It is also available to download for free from Libby.