Coming across a good sci-fi novel is very difficult. We're served a flood of wannabe stories playing with the same clichés. Whether it's alien invasions, time travel paradoxes, or dystopian regimes - they're only backdrops for cheap narratives. Shoot the alien, fix the timeline, overthrow the dictator, move on. You finish the book, go to sleep, and all that remains is a faint trace of adrenaline in your system. But good science fiction should leave you thinking. It should haunt you. It should make you question things you took for granted.
And this is exactly what The Three-Body Problem does. It's a rollercoaster of twists, turns, and deep ideas - cosmological, philosophical, scientific, and I don't even know what else to call it. Compared to those formulaic novels, there's very little you can predict, or at least not until the very last moment when the pieces finally click together. The science (as far as I can judge) is sound. The aliens aren't just monsters in makeup - they're genuinely alien, shaped by physics we can understand but experiences we can't imagine. And the human response isn't heroic unity but something far more disturbing: fracture, betrayal, despair.
If you've ever pondered the Fermi Paradox, or even just slightly while gazing into a night sky - The Three-Body Problem will blow your mind. It doesn't just answer the question of where everybody is. And you might spend the rest of the book wishing it was wrong.