The Three-Body Problem

I just don't get all the praise and awards for this book. I guess a lot was lost in translation...but the English version won awards also, so not sure. To me it felt like someone challenged the author to write a novel and use every single word from the glossary of a physics textbook. I kept waiting for the book to get to the good part, because surely with all the praise, it would get better. I would describe the book like this. Take a simple scene of a child throwing their red ball toy accross a room, and watching it bounce with wonder. This book would describe it like this: Child throws ball with speed of 3 meters per second. First bounce is 30cm high, 2nd bounce is 15cm high, 3rd bounce hits carpet, and rolls to a stop due to friction. End scene.

I know this won a reputable award, and I actually liked the unique style of writing (I'd describe it as 1st person reflective, my words, I have no literary background), but characters too near the end to develop, and oddball events appeared from nowhere with no context although story line was dramatically affected. The ideas were neat, original, but I don't think I will read the next one in this series. Still, I think that this author has a promising future, it's just that I don't have the time to stay with this series.

While reading the book, I kept going back and forth on whether or not I liked it. There are certainly some cool ideas and there are creative and well written parts. However, much of it is undone by being completely absurd, ridiculous to the extreme, and downright ludicrously implausible. For instance, the civilization described is a cool idea but simply absurdly impossible to exist, especially where it exists in the story. I understand there is significant inherent difficulty in writing characters who are more intelligent than the author. But these supposedly intelligent people are more like blithering idiots. Like many unfortunate sci-fi writers, the author seems to have grasped the tip of scientific principles, completely misunderstood them, then carried these misconceptions to absurd consequences. I suppose a good microcosmic example for most of my issues with this book can be summed up by the fact that it would seem the author doesn't realize that his book actually deals exclusively with the four body problem.