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I finally finished the Three Body series, as a result of enthusiastic recommendation from several friends, but I emerge disappointed, and even perplexed about the scale of the discrepancy in people’s reception of sci-fi. TLDR: there are several fantastic diamonds of novel ideas sprinkled around, but they are mixed in with a very large mass of goo, full of soulless characters, narrative/logical inconsistencies, poor choices of what to expand on and what to omit, and a really disappointing conclusion. Okay lets get more concrete. **Spoiler alert.** I loved the grand scope of the story - the idea of a dark forest universe (a fun semi-resolution to the Fermi paradox), new physics (although the dimensionality manipulation was stretching it), the idea of fundamental physics as a weapon or a defense (e.g. space folding, or “slow fog”/dark domain), and the idea that there is a huge technological disparity between different civilizations. I also really liked that the story spans a huge amount of time, that there are different “eras” (the post-deterrence era in Australia era was my favorite), etc. A lot of these concepts were truly a joy to contemplate. Unfortunately, for every 1 awesome nugget, you must pay with 1 hour of your life spent on something unbelievable, irrelevant, annoying, or naive. Sometimes you have to spend several hours, such as when the author decides that he’s going to insert a whole different book into this book, which comprises three fairy tales that end up having a limited impact on the story. You also have to suffer through exceedingly under-developed, non-sensical and outright unbelievable characters, who have no soul. As for the world itself, some "new physics" is intriguing (strong interaction droplets, short/medium/fast comms, photoid strikes), some are dubious (dimension folding, people traversing dimensions), and some are very hard to understand the purpose of (e.g. mini-universes at the very end). Some other concepts you would expect in a universe are also missing entirely. In particular, Artificial Intelligence plays no role in this universe, except for some AI side kicks in your spaceship. I was also reading through a few other reviews, and found a paragraph that resonated with my experience, in that it gave a lot of examples of the neurotic/rash writing style, so I’ll quote it entirely: “However, the story arc is very, very unsatisfying. Lots of cool things happen, and then the story stops or changes direction. Wade has built light speed technology? Better kill that story line so we can do more hibernation. The second Trisolaran fleet had this epic battle - but we're not going to tell you anything about it... just that it was epic... They managed to make little pocket universes, but we're not telling you how they did it, or how they brought one over to the Blue Planet. Galactic humans established colonies, but yes, you guessed, never going to see them. 4-dimensional civilization encountered? Nope, not gonna revisit it apart from some cryptic conversation with its AI. Evil 4-dimensional-converted-to-3-dimensional aliens who drive the annihilation of the universe with dimensional strikes? Yep, not gonna mention or encounter them again. Love story between the main character and her brain-rehydrated lover? Yeah, they just miss each other by a few minutes/million years and he hooks up with her best friend. Final fate of main characters? You guessed! It stays a mystery! 10 dimensional "Eden" reborn universe that the main characters were going to visit? Oh, never mind, we're going to save a few kilograms worth of mass, we don't really want to see it that bad…” Recommendation? Read if you have a lot of time on your hands, but do not be afraid to skip large sections. 3/5 - "it was okay". 3/5
— Andrej Karpathy
2017-04-04 on goodreads.com