You can now listen to "The Three Body Problem" as a serialized podcast

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Originally published at: You can now listen to "The Three Body Problem" as a serialized podcast | Boing Boing

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Is the book worth reading? I bought it a couple of years ago on impulse but haven’t worked up the will to jump in. I don’t know what to expect mainly :slight_smile:

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If you like big idea style SF with a dash of social commentary, then yes. I personally really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The second and third weren’t as good, but the first stands on it’s own and IMHO I think is worth a read. The Western writers I’d favorable compare Cixin Liu to are Greg Bear and David Brin.

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I do think part of what gave me hesitancy to read it was that i had heard that the other books weren’t as good so it did take some wind out of my desire to start it. I do intend to read it some day :slight_smile: thanks for your thoughts on it

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It’s a brilliant book but as a typical American reader I found I needed a cheat sheet for characters. I do the same for Russian novels (when I first read C&P, I thought there were three times the number of characters that actually existed because of Russian naming conventions).
I still chew over one of the great revelations in the book: that any kind of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would be disastrous for humankind. Good, bad, or indifferent, such contact would almost destroy us.

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Good call on Brin and Bear. I’d add Benford.

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I love the entire trilogy. I did bail on the 2nd book for a while, but it was during lockdown and I could barely read anything. So glad I resumed. There are tons of cool concepts throughout. For me, the trilogy was so far-reaching that I nearly felt like, “welp, that’s it for me, no use reading any more sci-fi!” - I have since recovered.

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I couldn’t get away with it, but I’ve later read that the translation of the first book is pretty poor. It read very much like Asimov/Clarke-era SF to me, with all the attendant backwardness re: women, etc.

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