Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

The three body problem.

Tue Sep 10, 2019

144 Words

I’ve just zipped through this book in what feels like about a week, but was probably a bit longer.

I didn’t like it.

The book sets up engagement with a computer game as a key plot driver, along with specific behaviours of an alien civilisation. Both of these are central to the driver of the book and in both cases I wasn’t able to believe what was happening.

They lacked internal consistency and plausibility, in particular the plot device of unpacking a proton and accessing higher dimensional spaces.

I also found the motivations of many of the main characters odd given the information they were presented with.

What the book did well was exploring possible ramifications of the edges of the unknown in our understanding of modern physics. It was also fascinating to see the social structures of communist China manifest in the characters.

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