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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Just finished The Three-Body Problem trilogy. What a saga. I finished the last book a month or two back and I still find myself randomly thinking about various ideas that I picked up in those books. If you're "serious" about sci-fi, I would say that you really do have to read those books as part of your "curriculum".

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The other two books are _that_ good?

I just finished the first book. The three body problem and its ramifications was interesting, as was the social background. Other than that, it was a decent YA novel, nothing more. If the other two are that much better, I'll give 'em a shot but otherwise...

IMO the first book was the strongest, followed by the third, I found the 2nd a slog to get through.

The second was a slog for me too BUT weirdly enough the ideas and events that I'm thinking about the most come from that book. I have wondered many times whether the second book would have been a more enjoyable read if they had stuck with the translator from the first book, who also translated the third book.

Seems like everyone disagrees with the ranking of 3PB books. Probably a good thing. On 2 read-throughs, I vastly prefer 2 then 3, and consider 1 a bit of a slog.

If you've already read 1, you really should read 2/Dark Forest.

How accessible is this?

My mom loves sci-fy, but she probably doesn't have the math/physics chops to hit something too deep in those topics.

She'd be fine

I can recall only a few physics-heavy moments in the trilogy. Don't recall any math-heavy moments.

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