Later, when Ye refuses to falsely accuse her dead father, she is beaten, starved, and left to die in a cold wet cell. As a young girl during the Cultural Revolution, Ye witnesses her scientist father beaten to death by zealous schoolgirls while her sister, who had betrayed him, is killed and hung from a wall. The first book, The Three-Body Problem, starts with Ye Wenjie. Even the characters who act treacherously are bound by an ideology that is attempting to save a version of Earth – however, some of those versions won’t include humans. Yet, at each crucial stage, it is a single human who must face their own doubt and find the emotional and intellectual resolve needed to save Earth. This is the foundation of his imaginative vision that sees humans face numerous hostile alien forces and ultimately journey to the end of time. One of Liu’s great skills is being able to realistically describe and explain the immensely large and the infinitesimally small. Increasingly through the series, you feel like a smaller and smaller speck in an almost incomprehensibly vast universe. The third and final book, Death’s End, was released recently in English and has been nominated for a highly coveted Hugo Award – won by the first book in the series in 2015.

(Just as we tend to call the author Cixin Liu, though he would more properly be called Liu Cixin, with his family name first.) The trilogy is properly titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past, although in the West it is often referred to it as The Three-Body Problem series. The former US president praised its immense scope and, from his unique perspective, found it great fun to read – because his own problems at the time with national security paled into insignificance in the face of the world’s impending annihilation. In fact, the tantalising ideas and boundless landscape have garnered The Three-Body Problem some very famous tech-savvy devotees, including Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. ‘Hard’ science fiction doesn’t have to be hard to read, and even though Cixin Liu admits The Three-Body Problem is more about ideas than character, it is quite easy to be drawn along by the compelling narrative and astounding concepts. Tags: Barack Obama/ Chinese SFF/ Cixin Liu/ Elon Musk/ Hugo Awards/ Mark ZuckerbergĬixin Liu takes the tropes of science fiction and looks at them with new eyes in this ambitious and imaginative series.

The three body problem 2016