Book review: The Three-Body Problem by Cíxīn Liú
2026-07-20 BOOK-REVIEW
“All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist.”
— Cíxīn Liú, The Three-Body Problem
A couple of years after the Netflix show, with no word about the second season, I decided that it’s time to tackle the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Cíxīn Liú. These books have received universal acclaim—this one specifically won a Hugo award for best novel—and I’ve been going through a bit of a sci-fi phase, so I was quite excited to dive in.
The Three-Body Problem begins with a memorable scene of unrest during China’s Cultural Revolution. Throughout the streets of Beijing different revolutionary groups fight for their ideologies, and on a university campus, professors are being publicly disciplined for the supposed counter-revolutionary messages in the science they teach. This scene introduces us to what, for me, was the highlight of this novel: throughout the story, we’re treated to flash-backs as we jump between the modern time-line and the memories of Ye Wenjie, the daughter of one of these professors and an accomplished scientist in her own right. In addition to advancing the main plot, these sections give us western readers a glimpse into an unfamiliar part of world history, and also touch on themes of environmentalism and the cost of human “progress”, especially when the benefits of that supposed progress are in doubt.
In the present-day storyline, we follow Wang Miao, a nanotechnologist who gets caught up in a government investigation into a string of suspicious suicides by prominent scientists. As the plot unfolds, more mysteries arise, and we’re introduced to different factions that each are pursuing their own motives. Wang is accompanied through this by Da Shi, a fan-favourite character who’s your typical “loose cannon” policeman that is as skilled as he is irreverent. With its grounded setting in modern-day Beijing, this part of the story feels as much like a detective thriller as it does science fiction, as we follow the pair’s attempts to uncover the ultimate cause of the suicides. There’s intrigue, violence, and even a didactic VR game reminiscent of the one from Ender’s Game, though less abstract.
Each chapter advances the story in a way that almost feels episodic, which isn’t surprising as the story was first serialised in a sci-fi magazine before being published as a novel. This also may explain why a certain action set-piece, which was an impressive dramatic climax in the Netflix series, is much more tamely represented here, as just another one of a series of scientific vignettes. That said, the book does have some sense of structure, building up to a climax that contains some surprises even for viewers of the TV series.
My first criticism of the book is a bit of a nit-pick: having heard of its reputation as a “hard” science-fiction masterpiece, I was a bit let down by how the science is handled. The book does talk about science non-stop; most of the characters are scientists, and when they’re not running experiments or picking apart data, they philosophise about the bigger picture behind their life’s work. These discussions often feel less like genuine scientific conversations, though, and often more like a surface-level “name-dropping” of scientific concepts. The concepts themselves are interesting, but they’re not always organically woven into the plot, or explored in any depth. A memorable case of this for me was a discussion of the cosmic background radiation—the observable ambient temperature of outer space that is a remnant of the Big Bang. The characters briefly discuss the difficulty in being able to measure it, before moving straight to using very improbable-seeming special glasses to view it [1]. In other cases, where the science is more critical to the plot, it’s sometimes employed in a hand-wavy way to justify some story beat. I almost appreciate this more, as it feels less gimmicky.
This leads into my other, more significant complaint: the characters are often just not believable as people. As most of their time is spent in scientific debate, we don’t always feel like we understand their motivations and actions. The most jarring example of this was a scene where a police raid on a terrorist meeting results in a stand-off, and the action is paused so that the terrorists can weigh their bombs to prove that they’re made of dense fissile materials. It reads not so much like a real-life scene, as a child’s imagination of what a cool science-based stand-off would look like. In another passage, a side-character volunteers his life story, and the picture he paints is one of complete dis-passion and disinterest in the world outside of his field of study. I wondered at times if some of this was a result of the translation from Chinese, but given the meagre character development, it’s hardly a surprise that Da Shi—the most prominent non-scientist character—is the most likeable.
Despite these criticisms, I still thoroughly enjoyed my time with The Three-Body Problem. The climactic scenes are imaginative and mind-bending, and the ending does feel like a suitable pay-off for the journey we’ve had with Wang Miao and Da Shi. Although it serves as a prelude to the grander scale of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, The Three-Body Problem also stands as an engaging and rewarding novel in its own right, enjoyable even as a stand-alone work.
---[1] - Incidentally, this whole passage made me wonder if Cíxīn Liú has read Marcus Chown’s The Afterglow of Creation, an excellent book on this topic that opens describing exactly such a pair of hypothetical frequency-hopping glasses.