The Three-Body Problem
“If you haven't read, the books are great. It's mind-blowing in terms of its epicness.”
Why it is worth your time
The Three-Body Problem is the first novel in Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. It appeared in China in 2008 and in English in 2014, in Ken Liu's translation, and won the 2015 Hugo Award for best novel. The story opens during the Cultural Revolution, when an astrophysicist named Ye Wenjie makes contact with an alien civilization, and moves to the present day, where scientists are dying and a virtual-reality game hides the reason. Jason raised it on the podcast in January 2024, 2 months before the Netflix adaptation, and said the books were great and epic in scale. Science fiction is a regular sideline for him alongside founder biographies. It suits readers who like hard science fiction with large ideas. The caveats are that physicist Chad Orzel found the characters flat and the science explained in leaden expository speeches, and the trilogy gets longer, with the finale near 600 pages.
