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    The Three-Body Problem
    The Three-Body Problem
    The Three-Body Problem
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Three-Body Problem

    Written by Cixin Liu

    Narrated by Luke Daniels

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The inspiration for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem!

    WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

    Over 1 million copies sold in North America

    “A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times • “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Fascinating.”—TIME • “Extraordinary.”—The New Yorker • “Wildly imaginative.”—Barack Obama • “Provocative.”—Slate • “A breakthrough book.”—George R. R. Martin • “Impossible to put down.”—GQ • “Absolutely mind-unfolding.”—NPR • “You should be reading Liu Cixin.”—The Washington Post

    The Three-Body Problem is the first novel in the groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning series from China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

    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. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

    The Three-Body Problem Series
    The Three-Body Problem
    The Dark Forest
    Death's End

    Other Books by Cixin Liu
    Ball Lightning
    Supernova Era
    To Hold Up the Sky
    The Wandering Earth
    A View from the Stars

    A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    TranslatorKen Liu
    Release dateNov 11, 2014
    ISBN9781427251992
    The Three-Body Problem
    Author

    Cixin Liu

    Cixin Liu is China's #1 SF writer and author of The Three-Body Problem – the first ever translated novel to win a Hugo Award. Prior to becoming a writer, Liu worked as an engineer in a power plant in Yangquan.

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    Reviews for The Three-Body Problem

    4.5/5

    824 ratings148 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Incredibly original SF book. I could not see where it was going to progress to as I was reading. It makes the beginning of the book difficult to read, as you don't see a point in what is happening. But it all comes together in the end. Written very well. The ending leaves it open for the rest of the trilogy. I look forward to the next translations.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      The best science fiction book I've read since Ender's Game, which was the best science fiction book I read since Foundation. Wonderful use of principles and ideas from the world of physics, specifically celestial mechanics. Plus, as a bonus, an inside view on the Cultural Revolution in China. Absolutely top-notch.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I read this for my bookclub, otherwise I would have stopped by one-third the way through. I love science fiction and rarely want to throw down a book in frustration, but this one was so tedious it fit the bill!Interesting premise that was never really developed because there was way too much physics. Characters were unlikable and the plot was difficult to follow. And then at the end . . . there really wasn't one! This is book one in a trilogy. Ugh. No thanks.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I feel like at least half of this book went straight over my head. The details about multiple dimensions and proton folding and unfolding made whooshing sounds as they passed me by. Despite that, though, I'm pretty sure I got the general gist of the story.

      It was very interesting reading a book set in China by a Chinese writer. There were a lot of things, like the Cultural Revolution, that I was sort of aware of from history classes, but reading about it from this point of view made it much more real.

      My 14-year-old has read and loved the entire series. He's much smarter than I am. :)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a science fiction work by Liu Cixin, Chinese author, translated by Ken Kiu, narrated by Luke Daniels. (good job of narrating). It is the first of the Remembrance of Earth's Past series. The story begins during the cultural revolution which was a very difficult time in China. I am quite surprised by the book considering it is from China and is quite frank about problems of the cultural revolution. The story is about the a contact made with an alien race that will likely destroy the human race that is made by a human who is dismayed by humanity on earth. The three body problem is a mathematical problem of calculating the trajectory of the bodies interacting with each other. There simply is a lot of math and science and ecology as well as history in this book. It won the Hugo award.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Disappointing. Some interesting ideas but poorly written ( or perhaps something is lost in translation? ) Some cheesy dialogue and overly reliant on "data dumps"

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This book is so disjointed, it's ridiculous. I want to rearrange chapters, maybe alternate some of the alien chapters with the earth chapters. Something. Going through two thirds of the book from the Earth perspective, then the last third with the alien perspective ... no. UGH! How did this book win awards? Concept?Much of the book deals with Physics. Theoretical Physics. Description of the actual theory, etc. DRY! It's what the entire book is going to be about. There was too much a feel of a physics textbook than a novel to this book. I'd edit out about half the science jargon, maybe make this a novella.The book lacks things that would draw people in. The science based people are so jargon rich, it's hard to feel sympathy for them. Very little action, from a Western idea, and lots of background or science description. It took almost a third of a book to find out why we had the beginning character and connect to the primary protagonist.There were times that I thought the in-book game seemed like the more interesting storyline than most of the rest. The more I think about it, the more it feels like the author tried to take the popular concepts of popular books and merge them into one book. There is a stretch of reading off redacted documents aka World War Z. There is a game of survival like Hunger Games. There is the whole mystery to solve thing. There's the aliens that never appear. I'm baffled and lost how this book got such buzz to it. Not that good a book. Maybe it's because it's a translation and its home country would absorb this type thing. Just not my type book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Ein wirklich interessanter Science-Fiction Roman!Man merkt, das er von einem Naturwissenschaftler geschrieben wurde, er wirkt korrekt. Die Idee, die im letzten Drittel dann deutlich wird (ich will jetzt nicht spoilern), ist wirklich interessant und auch, was der Autor im Nachwort schreibt, finde ich bedenkenswert.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Book is incredible, the Chinese pronunciation of the narrator on this audio book, however, is terrible!
    • 5/5
      Great book very interesting with all physics involved in the book one of my favorites
    • 5/5
      The first book in the trilogy of the best sci-fi novels ever written. The Remembrance of Earth trilogy is the most imaginative, yet realistic tale of alien invasion. The Three-Body Problem is the slowest of the three, but it establishes the base for the terrifying and mind-altering realities to come in the next two books. The glimpses of the horrifying future we get in this book chill you to the core and make you feel desperate to read the next one!
    • 4/5
      Fantastic book. This is a fresh perspective on sci-fi for me and I'm instantly going to read the next in the series. The only reason it didn't get a 5 was because I felt a few parts were overlong and dragged a bit, and some of the characters weren't fleshed out a huge deal - I don't know whether this is my western perspective or just the way this guy writes though! Translator did a brilliant job explaining historical context with footnotes where needed and integrating explanations with text if that could be done, great work.
    • 3/5
      I feel like I've read this whole book and now I'm ready to read the book. Good thing there's a sequel.
    • 3/5
      I had been hearing about this book for a while now so I was able to get a review copy and try it out for myself. The story is set a few years ahead of us with the VR tech but it is very much in the modern time. There are several flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution in China that sets up motivation for the person that causes first contact. We don’t see the aliens except in a VR world that was set up by followers of the aliens to recruit more people to their cause. The book is studded with footnotes to give the reader historical and social context to the story since all the action is set in China. Nothing is resolved by the end of the book since there are two more in the series but the ending is interesting enough to leave you wanting to see what comes in the next book.

      Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley
    • 3/5
      This left me a little cold, even though it's highly rated. I kept reading to the end though, and didn't regret it.
    • 4/5
      Interesting but rather outlandish concepts. The characters had the depth of cardboard cutouts, except for the main character, who had all the depth of a particle folded into one dimension.
    • 3/5
      It's hard to decide quite how I felt about this: it has distinct good and bad points.Broadly speaking, the book's strong points are its attention to detail and its imagination. The former lets it paint quick but compelling pictures of very disparate eras and situations, as it skips rapidly between the Cultural Revolution, recent history, some alt-hist that blurs into sci-fi, and a bizarre virtual reality universe. The latter means it has a web of scientific issues tied quite neatly together (to the best of my very limited physics), but more importantly, some very intriguing plot. The activities of the Red Cloud are mildly intriguing, but it's Wang's experiences with first a peculiar mental abberation and then the compelling world of Three Body that persuaded me to read on.The downside is that the style of the book is extremely dry, and almost totally devoid of character. Even the raw early scenes of the cultural revolution felt rather clinical, and Wang's maddening experiences are only slightly more convincing. I had very little sense of the characters and never developed any - they feel detached. Even Ye, whose outlook and feelings are absolutely crucial to the events of the book, never convincingly depicted either to me. I don't know to what extent this is a cultural-translation issue, but to a large extent this book read to me like an extended mashup of a physics textbook and the more technical sort of murder mystery. Emotions are described, but I didn't really feel them; more significantly, I didn't really get much sense of who anybody is, or what they want, or any particular connections between them. That's a little exaggerated - I got a mild sense of a bond between Wang and Da Shi, but that's basically as far as it goes.Also, I don't know about anyone else, but I guessed more or less what was going on in the simulation pretty quickly - there's an enormous giveaway that sort of spoils it.After the very dry and rather gruelling early chapters, I was tempted to stop reading. I'm glad I didn't, because once the mystery started with Wang, I was interested enough to keep reading. However, I still found it rather hard going. I don't think I'll read the rest of the series; I know the answers to all the questions now, and there is basically nothing to make me care about these characters, so I have no reason to want to spend any more time with them. I'm sad because I was looking forward to some Chinese science fiction and this book was very popular, but it doesn't really do much for me.
    • 5/5
      Takes on a heart-pounding immediacy. The non-western take on hard SciFi is interesting. I particularly liked the message-passing and middleman deception that adds complexity to the typical us vs them dynamic.
    • 3/5
      This was a tough one for me... I kept losing the narrative. It may have had to do with the book being an e-book, because when I switched to a hardback things went more smoothly. Also, when I read when I was tired, the page would show a character's name as "Sha", but my brain autocorrected to "She", and I kept wondering who "she" was and when a female entered the scene. Thank you Tor, for the ebook, and javaczuk (via Harriet) for the hard copy.
    • 4/5
      A highly scientific journey to doomsday
      Wordy at times, and info dumps struggle reader’s ability to keep focused, but i will read the 2nd book to see if the plot overtakes the science
      Very cool ideas
    • 2/5
      I guess I just don't care for hard sci-fi that takes place during the current age.
    • 4/5
      this was a very good book, but not 5 stars sadly. I find it's premise interesting but not gripping. the active characters don't get enough action I feel, and act more as frames to the story. which in part makes it seem more of a book to setup a sequel rather than a standalone book
    • 3/5
      Obviously a very good book. I think I just wasn’t in the right headspace for it (and also from the first time in I opened it until finishing the last page it was over 3 years, which can’t have helped).
    • 5/5
      Interesting book. Great narration, really makes the incredible story come alive. Technical but not at all hard to follow. Funny at times. A treat very for any fan of science fiction.
    • 4/5
      4/5 of this book was really awesome. Felt like the editor kind of fell asleep at the end--it's rare for "the slog" to be in the last 40-50 pages.
    • 4/5
      This science fiction novel from China treats the theme of first contact with an alien species through the lens of the Cultural Revolution and subsequent Chinese history. The science fiction I read is usually a little lighter on the heavy science than The Three Body Problem, but I still really enjoyed this novel. I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is not already a science fiction fan though.The aliens in question (who have the "three body problem") are the Trisolarians who reside on a planet light years away from Earth. Their planet orbits three suns, and the resultant unpredictable gravitational pull and climate changes wreak havoc on their civilization. At times they experience stable periods during which their civilization flourishes; at unpredictable times there is chaos with weather patterns, they may broil or freeze, there are violent storms and earthquakes etc., and their civilization is destroyed.During the Cultural Revolution a dissident scientist sends an unauthorized message to the universe describing earth and its location. Years later, the message having reached Trisolaris, a dissident there sends back a message warning Earth to beware of the Trisolarians. It turns out that the Trisolarians are seeking a stable planet, and are launching an expedition to Earth to conquer and destroy human civilization. The expedition will arrive in 400 years. In the meantime, the Trisolarians have sent special bodies called "sophons" which will ensure that Earth science will progress no further during the ensuing 400 years until the arrival of the Trisolarian fleet.The Three Body Problem is the first of a trilogy relating to Earth's preparation for an alien invasion. This particular book concerns the initial reactions on Earth, the discovery that science can progress no further, issues about how a life will be lived under a death sentence, albeit one not to be executed until 400 years in the future. I found it impossible to read this book and not continue on with the second volume of the trilogy, The Dark Forest, to see what happens. If you are a science fiction fan, this is a great addition to the genre. (I think it won the Hugo--I will check),3 1/2 stars
    • 4/5
      The thing that I really love about Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem is that it feels so real it feels more like a nonfiction book more than a science fiction book.

      It's so well-researched and carefully crafted that it transcends a lot of what I know about sci-fi (admittedly not a lot) and it doesn't bother with a lot of tropes that other sci-fi novels or stories tend to rely on.

      Space and interplanetary worlds aside, I was introduced to something I'd never experienced before - rural China. I read about the Greater Khingan Mountains, its trees, its birds, its sky, its earth. I read about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the setting of the red sun.

      The isolation in this book is paramount to the craft of the characters and their development. They are singular, they are complex, and you'll find yourself thinking about them when you don't have to.

      Cixin Liu takes these huge concepts about space, lightyears and the stars and carefully unfurls them until it's almost as if you've hovering above this world he's created, watching everything happen moment by moment. He takes genuine scientific theory and makes it accessible, applies it to his story and makes it readable.

      This book moves like water down a mountain, gathering momentum until it rushes out into the ocean. Liu creates an atmosphere that will grip you from start to finish, and stay with you long after you've finished.

      All I can say is I can't wait until the next book in the trilogy comes out. c:
    • 3/5
      Very original in some ways, but deeply cliched in others (especially where it comes to characterization and human interactions). Might appeal more to those who love hard SF.
    • 5/5
      This first book in the trilogy was a bit challenging for me to get through, but it kept on paying off and then I got to The Dark Forest. If you initially find this a difficult but intriguing read, keep going because it explodes into one of the most epic stories I've ever read. To put that in perspective, sci fi is my favorite genre. It's all I know. It's my hobby. Its references are permanently tattooed on half of my arm. I know good science fiction, but this....THIS is the trilogy that kept me up at night. That I still think about literally every day at least once. This is a once in a lifetime book and a perfect story spanning many many years with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It's the kind of story that stays with you the rest of your life.
    • 5/5
      One of the bast hard science fiction titles out there.
      If you are a fan of this genre, this whole trilogy is a must-read.