After so many reccomendations from friends, I finally read through “The Three-Body Problem”, a science fiction novel by Cixin Liu. Before this, I had not read a full novel in probably a good six years. It surpassed my expectations completely.
Originally written in Chinese, The Three-Body Problem takes place during the Cultural Revolution. As someone who didn’t have much background info on this period, the setting alone made the story interesting.
What I liked most about the novel was its use of science principals and the joy of learning as a method for engagement as well as horror. A key plot point in the story is that scientists all around the world are going insane as the scientific method begins breaking down and unexplainable, un-reproducable results keep appearing. I definitely felt this nag. Whenever a weird result comes up in my work or research, I always dive in and can spend days trying to figure out what caused it. But in the end, there is always a concrete reason why things went wrong. If I lost this sense of trust that the world was understandable and consistent, I might lose my sanity as well.
In the end, the reason I couldn’t put the book down was that I couldn’t help but stay awake wondering what could possibly happen next. Right from the beginning, the author began throwing out-of-imagination events and settings, such as the world in the virtual video game Three Body. But even though I could never predict what would happen, everytime a new bit of info was revealed, my reaction was like finding the last piece to a puzzle. Everything was connected, and even the unexplainable is eventually explained throughout the course of the novel.
