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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to use my vote to vote against the Three Body Problem. If more people keep recommending it, more people will have to read it, and that would make me sad.

Because it's a terrible book.

It epitomizes the sort of sci Fi that sci Fi people keep recommending, with it's kinda interesting concept and embarrassingly bad writing. It's just hundreds of pages of unreadable.

And it ends abruptly before resolving anything so it tricks you into getting the sequel. Which is somehow even more poorly written.

See also: children of time

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I wouldn't call it bad writing. It is different from what I used to. It is non-linear, which is actually quite common (eg see Hyperion) and I would say not-character-focused. It is more about a concept itself. And even though latter I don't like much, the core idea of the book is very interesting.

For me it was harder to read, but still very enjoyable experience.

>And it ends abruptly before resolving anything hmmm, I wonder what kind of books you usually read. Because this is very common approach, when authors don't do full LoTR ending, but end story at the point when reaching it would be rewarding, but won't everything to the last bit, so readers can still think about for a while.

I know what you mean about the bad writing, but I don’t think that makes it a terrible book. Unfortunately most sci-fi has flat writing for the same reason most great literature recycles the same ideas and concepts: it’s hard to do everything at once.

Sci-fi generally sacrifices prose quality and character depth to pack in more interesting ideas; great literature generally makes the opposite tradeoff. If you read a sci-fi novel expecting great writing you’ll be frustrated.

Three Body Problem had enough interesting ideas to keep me turning the page, where most sci-fi novels don’t—I prefer short stories for sci-fi exactly because of the generally low quality writing.

Some people like this kind of book. In fact, I sometimes wonder if explicitly "bad writing" is good for hard sci-fi, at least some authors. My personal favorite example is Greg Egan. In Permutation City/etc., characters are cardboard cutouts, but the books are wonderful based on the ideas. Then in Teranesia he tried to write characters but the ideas fell flat IMHO. It's almost like there's limited bandwidth...

+1 for poor writing. I tried to read it after hearing recommendations and being interested in the idea of Sci-fi happening outside of the US. I got bored halfway through the first volume and dropped it.

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