Who wants to talk to me about the Three-Body Problem trilogy?
It was in some ways a little dumb, but I absolutely couldn't put it down.
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I really liked the plot point where a mystery of alien civilization is revealed through a video game. What did you think?
I tried to talk to my boss, who is very well read in Russian sci-fi, and he said that the only thing novel thing for him was the cultural revolution backdrop
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That reminded me of the side game in Ender’s game a bit.
Yeah I liked that. Very clever. Da Shi has potential as a detective if developed over lots of short stories/short mystery novels. Felt underutilized due to the plot sprawl. Surprise villain was good.
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Plots only get sprawlier, I'm afraid, and he's even more underutilized in book 2.
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The "civilization that tries to develop on an unstable 3-sun system" was kind of clever, but its revelation was sort of ruined by the fact that the phrase "3-body problem" means exactly such a system to a physics-trained person. So I new it was coming almost from the beginning
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Yeah, I did too, though initially I expected some sort of relationship triangle.
Is the weird high-dimensional physics crap at the end even vaguely plausible info-theoretically? Like 2 protons containing a box full of magic tricks?
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It violates good storytelling too. You don’t throw whole new world-building premise in late into act 3. It annoyed me.
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