Book: The Three Body Problem

 Book: The Three Body Problem

Author: Cixin Liu

Pages: 400

This is my 85th read for the year

This book begins during China's Cultural Revolution.  Ye Wenjie's father was just beaten to death for crimes due to his intellect.  Ye is captured and sentenced to hard labor.  She is a known astrophysicist and is soon recruited by the Red Coast to try and contact extraterrestial life.  She discovers a way to get a message - by using the sun - into outerspace and tells no one when she sends it.  8 years go by before she gets a reply from a planet called Alpha Centauri.  The message tells Ye not to respond or the aliens will find out where they are and will come for them.  Ye - dissatisfied with how things are on earth - tells the aliens to come.

What entails over the next 40 years is Ye building a following for the arriving aliens.  Still 400 years away from getting to earth, she and her followers begin preparations.  But soon the military finds out what is going on and that the alients of Alpha Centauri are on their way - using the time until they get here to stop earth from advancing more scientifically.  

 A nanotechnology professor - Wang Miao - is asked to join the efforts of the police to discover why a group of scientist have killed themselves.  When Wang's own research threatens his life, he and the police and world leaders come up with a way to stop communication with the aliens and prepare for war.  Wang begins to play a game called Three Body which is how the alients communicate and show earth why they are coming.  Due to their planet being in trouble by being consummed by one of their suns, they must now find another planet to inhabit.  This is the beginning of sunset for humanity.

This was a great book. It is well written and very smart.  I actually watched the Netflix show first and it was well done.  There are some big differences between the show and the book (show took Wang and divided him up into several characters) but overall it followed the story line well.  It is very technical in spots - I really had to pay attention while I read - but overall an interesting story.  There are 4 books total, so I plan on continuing to see where this is going.

Stars: 5