COMMENTARY: The Three-Body Problem (2006)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading The Three-Body Problem (2006) by Cixin Liu. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
- Ch01. Boy there’s a lot of telling and info-dumping. Why not dramatize one of these struggle sessions?
- Omg, this is horribly written prose wise. It’s just platforming and ideas.
- So either Liu translated too literally and didn’t add his own flair, and/or the original prose is actually this clunky, but I am having a hard time with the forced analogies, the incredible amounts of telling/exposition, and the contrived plot.
- I’m reminded of The Master and Margarita (1967) and how much I hated that book. It was touted as this amazing book, but it was just badly written and you wonder if the hype was due to the chatter/word-of-mouth and/or it touched a large portion of the target market’s cultural soul that I simply can’t understand. To me, so far, the story here is primitive and lazy. It’s using mechanics (sees numbers in photos no one else can, a weird VR game with historical figures) that is either executed badly or just tropey. I can’t tell yet
- E.G. “King Zhou said, his face expressionless.” Why not “with a blank face”, or stone faced, or with a stony look. Why a four syllable word?
- Ok. I change my mind about the VR dream world. But why? I think it’s because the rehydrating bodies is a new concept. Whereas the historical figures traveling through the desert is a trope I’d seen in at least two graphic novels. (Was it Preacher or Sandman or both?). But also, we’re seeing actual stakes and consequences for this weird unpredictable Stable/Chaotic Era dichotomy. Rats eat dehydrated bodies and you wake up missing extremities or limbs. That’s interesting. And then the foreshadowed triple-comet happens. Now it’s interesting.
- this has to be shitty prose and not the translator’s fault: “line of twenty-eight parabolic antenna dishes, each with a diameter of nine meters, like a row of spectacular steel plants.”
- “Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.” This is the first line of dialogue that feels genuinely unique and different.
- this is not a complete sentence: “On the ground, both those who had already dehydrated and those who hadn’t began to burn like countless logs thrown into the belly of a furnace.”
- 40%. Nothing’s happening. And what I mean by that is nothing of importance with stakes is happening. It’s just incident after incident. This is like Musashi. Just events. And not even strong cause and effect events.
- omg. I don’t need all the reports in detail. You can summarize it for me and move on. You can tell me how it affects the characters and move on.
- 64%. How is everything barely moving? Wang goes to the meetups. The game progresses to the 192 iteration. More textbook science.