My Problem with Three-Body Problem.

🚨 SPOILER WARNING 🚨

If you have not read it or watched the Netflix series.

⛔️

I wanted to love this book and find it as "Extraordinary" as The New Yorker declared. Unfortunately, it just didn't do it for me. Am I alone? I know lots of readers loved it and the TV adaptation seems to be well received. (More on that...)

I found parts of the books dragging and getting too 'sciencey' in the wrong ways. I do enjoy hard sci-fi and love how the 'science stuff' was used in The Martian and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir as well as in some of the explanations in Quantum Radio by A.G. Riddle. I just lost interest in the travels to the virtual world of 3 Body and felt bored at times. These were done in a much more engaging way in the TV show.

Side note: The TV series has much more melodrama among the characters, who are "westernized" for the Netflix audience. (Not at all how I pictured Wang 🤣)

Other examples of dragging were when Wang goes through exhausting efforts with his cameras, his neighbor's camera, gets his family involved, and then dreams, only to wake up and see the countdown. This was handled much more quickly in the Netflix adaptation. The other part that lost me was when Wenjie reads reports with so much "redacted" - extremely repetitive and too long. This is not shown in the show.

Overall, the concept is amazing and the next book looks to get into some groundbreaking areas. For me, I am looking forward to season 2 on Netflix and do not think I will be reading book 2, though I hear it is much better paced than book 1.