Created at: 2024-07-17
I found this book on a highly-recommended list (on GoodReads, I believe) about recent Science Fiction books.
One thing that stood out when I was checking the list was the author's nationality: Chinese. I've never read a book that was written in Chinese and then translated into English. This didn't matter at all, the translation job was impeccable, at least from my perspective. The book read well and it didn't feel like I was reading a book written in Chinese and translated verbatim into English. Much the opposite, I was surprised about the clarity on the written with a little bit of stylistic spice here and there.
Once I finished checking some of the books in that Science Fiction list, I thought that it would be interesting, if not different, to read a non-western Science Fiction book and that is how we ended up here.
It was indeed a wonderful surprise. The first book has many interesting and truly factual Chinese stories about the Chinese revolution or that happened during the Chine revolution.
As an example, one of the main characters in the first book is an astrophysicist lady that is outcast into the farm fields of China. Her punishment came from being associated with the university elites that refused to mask science into something unscientific just to satisfy the revolution taking place in China that killed many intellectuals at the time.
The books are packed with scientific information from current physics and mathematics theories (that's where the name "three-body problem" in the first book comes from). The small "adjustments" to real theories that emancipate the scientific universe of the books and open up room for imagination are subtle and blend well with the story.
All in all I think this trilogy is really special. I'll risk to say that this trilogy is as good as the Foundation Series from Isaac Asimov, which is to this date one of my favourite Science Fiction series of all time. I still have much more Sci-fi to read, to don't get to hung up on that!