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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

I had high hopes, but TBP is a terrible novel. It certainly has some fascinating ideas, but just as many ludicrous ones that are equally central to the plot. Not to mention Liu is absolutely terrible at anything relating to characters: dialogue, character development, etc.

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Over in the s-f subreddits, this novel gets so much love. So I feel left out that I - like you few here - really hated it.

My big thing was that the science is just wrong.

Most fundamentally, it's not a three-body problem, there are (at least) four bodies: the three suns and the planet.

And the real world isn't going to follow any theoretical solution to TBP anyway. There is atmospheric drag, microscopic gravitational perturbations from the rest of the universe, decreasing solar masses as the stars age, and so forth.

In a system as chaotic as was described, any of these things make the problem intractable.

That said, I did enjoy the description of a digital computer implemented with "people" acting as the logic gates.

I don't understand your opposition to the name. The three body problem is so named precisely because it's intractable. In physics with two bodies you can perfectly model the evolution of a system, but as soon as you add a third it becomes chaotic and requires numerical simulation to approximate solutions.

I don't understand your opposition to the name. The three body problem is so named

Look at my first objection, that the problem described in the book has (at least) FOUR bodies. Yet the idea that it's a three-body problem is pervasive throughout the book.

Surely that in itself is enough to justify some aggravation.

I agree - I read the trilogy and enjoyed it somewhat but I wouldn't recommend it to others (unlike e.g. Hyperion Cantos or Fire Upon the Deep, etc).

The amount of suspension of disbelief for some questionable premises is very high. e.g. the real-time comms developed by one of the races breaks down one of the key axioms.

I read TBP and A Deepness in the Sky at the same time. Despite the "big ideas", TBP isn't even in the same league. Can't bring myself to read the second TBP book, just don't care. Did buy a Fire Upon a Deep recently, looking forward to it.

A Fire Upon the Deep is SUCH a good book. I loved it; the idea that something like the '90s net news had gone galaxy-wide was a great plot idea....

The first chapter itself was gripping. I was like, if this book is 1/10 as good as the first chapter, I'm sold. It's now one of the books I recommend to teen scifi readers.

Vinge is a master.

"Rainbows End" is must-read cyberpunk IMO. (And of course he wrote "True Names". (In '81!))

Reading that someone else had this opinion of TBP is so valididating. The book receives much hype but the characters are weak and forgettable.

Not that I want to pile on, but I didn't make it past 100 pages. It's badly written, and I don't want to waste my time when I could be reading something else.

Yeah. Having read all three, they were interesting but not anything I'd re-read.

The opening of TBP had me hoping -- being a big Neal Stephenson fan -- that the whole book would involve a lot more of the historical context of the early PRC, and then it all went somewhere completely different. I strongly feel that the first bit of the book set in the past is the best part of the entire trilogy.

The idea of Chinese sci-fi in general becoming a thing is very cool though, I think.

> historical context of the early PRC

I mean, China has censors. I get the feeling it had to be a somewhat veiled metaphor, although it felt extremely obvious too.

I was just debating about this book and read some not so favorable goodreads reviews about it. Can anyone recommend something similar to 2001 oddysey (the book) specially the part about going through the stargate?

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