Am I the only one who despises "The Three Body Problem"

Cafe Society
1

I read the first book in the trilogy “The Three Body Problem”, I don’t remember what the name of the trilogy is. Everyone else I know who has read it is either neutral or loves it, which I do not understand as it is a terrible book.

First, to set the record straight, the actual three body problem (the physics problem) is not that hard to handle. There are various special cases that are easy to handle analytically and the majority of situations fall into one of these situations. One of the most common is if one of the three objects is very small (I.E. the moon as compared to Earth and Sun). In addition, it is a piece of cake numerically (anyone who has one semester of high-school physics, and about 1 hour of learning programming can solve it).

The entire book as no basis in scientific fact at all. If I were to detail all the physics problems I’d have to write a book longer than the original. I am generally very forgiving on these things, but I think it is problematic if an author of a so-called “hard sci-fi” novel has no knowledge of physics and hasn’t even done 10 minutes of googling.

On top of the B-movie grade science, the book has a terrible plot. It is a traditional bland “aliens invade” plot that have been popular since H.G. Wells with no interesting twists or innovations.

Even this I could have ignored without despising the book. The biggest problem is that the book portrays scientists literally exactly opposite how they actually behave. In the book world-wide science is being thrown into disarray because the aliens are messing with experiments, one scientist even commits suicide. All real healthy scientists I know act completely opposite, and get very excited when they encounter phenomena they can’t explain. (In my field we regularly encounter phenomena previously thought to be impossible, and no one commits suicide over it).

Am I alone in how much I dislike this book?
For anyone who likes it, do these problems not bother you? Do you read hard sci-fi regularly?

2

I disliked it. I thought it was an interesting read, and I don’t need my sci-fi to be perfect science (no one actually does, they just have different blind spots), but I found the science conceits to be incoherent and uncompelling, and I never became invested in either the characters or where the story was going. I completed it, but wasn’t interested in reading the rest of the trilogy.

3

I found it mediocre. It pinballs between plot contrivances (including fortuitous meetings with rich people), weird science, and a tone occasionally reminiscent of 60s/early 70s sci-fi pseudo-philosophical woo.

The plot is entertaining enough that I read to the end, but I never made it to the sequel.

4

I found the characters not so great, but overall I really enjoyed it.

First, is the three-body problem really that trivial to solve? I have very little physics background so I took him at his word. Can you link to a discussion of the solution?

Second, I don’t think it’s just a bog-standard “aliens invade” scenario, as people have several centuries to prepare. That’s pretty unusual in alien invasion stories.

Third, the scientists weren’t excited by the anomalous results because the magic particle prevented them from studying the results: no experiment they performed could possibly create useful data to help explain what was going on, much less could create data that would help them fend off humanity’s impending annihilation. That’s different from normal anomalies.

I hold no illusions about the scientific rigor of the book, but several of the ideas in the book were super-creepy and cool, from the countdown on irises to the monofilament trap. Even the particle, which as I understand it is extra silly, was pretty cool.

In terms of books with compelling characters, I give it a miss. In terms of setting the perfect mood, I suspect something was lost in translation. But for awesome set-pieces, it’s up there with the best.

5

I was mixed. To me it was more interesting as a cultural perspective and commentary, a very cynical and depressing view of humanity from the specific of events of the Cultural Revolution to being generalized to intelligent life in the universe. It was very different than a typical Western sci fi work.

Details of the plot and the characters left my brain soon after reading though. Nothing all that memorable to either of them. Unlikable and unrelatable characters and not a plot page turner.

Not a series I’d recommend.

6

Depends on the situation. The OP reduces it to the state where it is easy to solve, in reducing at least one of the bodies to an insignificant mass. However, the three body problem is usually taken to mean that all three have sufficient mass to be affecting the other two. (Even in the case that one has an insignificant mass, it still is not 0, and still needs to be solved for if you are trying to be precise.)

In a two body problem, it’s easy to make an equation that you can pop in any future (or past) date, and it will tell you the state of the system at that time. In a three body problem, no such solution exists, the only way to tell how it will evolve is by simulating it step by step.

It’s not uncommon that a system can be reduced to, as the OP describes, having one mass that is trivial compared to the others, and so its effect can be eliminated, and get an answer that is close enough (though not precise). However, the 3 body problem is the first step in understanding the n-body problem, which is actually the case for all of the actual universe we live in, where the effects of literally countless objects need to be figured for not only how they affect the test mass, but eachother as well. You can’t get an accurate answer as to how the Sun-Earth-Moon system will evolve without taking into account Jupiter, for instance. And even that won’t be as accurate as if you take Saturn, Mars, and Venus into account, and so on. Then if you want more accuracy, you need to take into account how all those things are affecting eachother.

The 3 body problem, and its extension the n-body problem is actually an extremely hard problem to handle, except in certain cases when you have a fair amount of room for error and precision is not necessary.

As a metaphor to the story of the book, it is talking of 3 different cultures and species, whose actions cause unpredictable actions of the others, whose actions then have further unpredictable effects on eachother. Certainly not a trivial problem to solve.

Right, it’s one thing if we do an experiment and find an unexpected result. It’s quite another if everytime we do an experiment, we get a different, unpredictable result.

I don’t know if people would be necessarily committing suicide over it en masse, but taking up a new profession or hobby would certainly be appealing.

As far as that goes, absolutely. I had trouble getting into it, and never finished it, probably barely got a third of the way through.

7

It’s been sitting on my nightstand for five months, dog eared less than fifty pages from the end. The world inside the game was interesting, but the real world “mystery” is both confusing and boring.

8

I really liked both it and the 2nd book. I agree the characters often made stupid decisions but still enjoyed it. If you thought the decisions were stupid in the first book just wait until the 3rd. The author exponentially ramps up the protagonist’s stupidity. By the end of the book I wanted to punch her in the face.

The specific scenario discussed in the book is 3 stars. Why mention a solution where one of the objects is very small when it had nothing to do with the scenario in the book? It IS possible for a star to be ejected from a 3 star system so at least that part of the book is accurate.

9

That was kind of my take on it; the series was a very different take on a science fiction novel than I was used to. I didn’t hate the first two books- they were strange, but interesting. The “dark forest” idea was probably the most interesting concept of the whole thing though.

The third book just goes off the rails into downtown Crazytown though. I ground through it in order to see how it ended, but I didn’t much care for it or the ending.

10

I appreciate all the replies. I can understand appreciating the novel through the lens of sci-fi from a Chinese cultural viewpoint (I DID find the background with the cultural revolution interesting).

However, to defend my opinion a bit.

Sure, there is no analytical general solution to the three body problem. But there is no analytical general solution to almost ANY problem in physics (except simple text-book cases). The point I was trying to make is that that book blows it up into a HUGE problem, when in reality it is quite manageable. Sure the precise situation I mentioned isn’t applicable, but my point is that the three-body problem is not difficult to manage in any real-world situation. For example, at one point in the book a scientist mentions using genetic algorithms to solve the three body problem. This is ludicrous. The three body problem is not such a hard problem that you need genetic algorithms (or monte-carlo simulations). To solve it numerically all you have to do is define initial locations and velocities and throw any differential equation solver at it. The problem is so trivial numerically, you could work out 3-body trajectories by hand (as was often done before modern computing!).

Don’t get me started on the mono-filament trap. This whole scenario breaks the conservation of energy, nevertheless basic knowledge of how hard drives work…

I absolutely agree with one poster above that it is perfectly acceptable for a story to flout physical law (See Dr. Who and lord of the rings). The problem is when that work calls itself hard science fiction but can’t even get the difference between a monte-carlo simulation and a genetic algorithm straight. It makes me feel that the author was exceptionally lazy. Seriously, don’t use a term if you don’t even have a clue what it means (for hard sci-fi anyway).

It’s the equivalent of going to a so-called authentic Italian restaurant and discovering their main dish is tacos. You should not be surprised if this makes the Italians upset.

One poster above argued that the aliens tried to make any scientific results unusable. However, I can tell you as an experimental physicist that this is not a thing. There is no such thing as unusable data. The data may not be useful for the specific problem you are interested in, but it ALWAYS is either perfectly modeled data OR tells you something new and useful about the universe. For example, (again I take a small example to illustrate the bigger point), consider the scenario that the data is extremely noisy. In this case you can explore the source of the noise. Another example is if the experimental apparatus breaks. Then you can explore why it broke. For any unexpected result there is ALWAYS some interesting question that can be explored.

11

Absolutely not. I thought is was poorly written garbage, worked to finish the first book, and never attempted the rest. The science was stupid and the character actions were stupid. The only part about it I liked was the aside on the mob-mentality of the cultural revolution.

12

Does it, though?

It might be more like going to Carlo’s and assuming it’s Italian, discovering their main dish is tacos, and getting upset. The problem isn’t with the dish, it’s with the assumption about the dish.

I’m not sure it’s a good idea to judge a work based on the genre conventions it fails to uphold. I might cut a work some latitude if it’s unrealistic in a way that the genre allows, but in this case, it sounds like it might be a case of misidentified subgenre.

13

Forget the monomolecular filament, how about unfolding a proton (which is a cluster of quarks, gluons, and virtual particles) into a giant sheet, onto which they etch a magic supercomputer. That has got to be in the top ten most idiotic things that I have ever encountered, and I’m including QAnon.

14

Well, if you Google the name of the book and the phrase hard sci-fi, you get a lot of people claiming that it is, including reviewers. I for one certainly got that impression when I first went looking for it.

15

I made it through the first novel, but haven’t been interested enough to try and read the rest of the trilogy. I agree that the scenarios in the game playing were more interesting than what was happening in the “real world”.

Too bad Obama wasted a positive review on this. It’s probably the reason I read it in the first place.

16

Also, take a look at a summary of (a movie based on) another piece of crap he pooped out:

17

Yeah, others made that claim. But two things:

  1. If it’s not a hard sf novel and people claim it is, that’s a problem with people, not wwith the book.
  2. If you don’t think it’s hard SF and others do, maybe they’re defining the term differently from you. For example, if hard SF is defined as “science fiction in which the science is a major focus,” this book is hard SF. But if hard SF is defined as “science fiction in which the science is plausible,” this book apparently isn’t.
18

I was shocked by how terrible it was–as science, as fiction. I’ve never known a scientist to run around squawking like that. I kept waiting for a scientist to say something like “the rules of physics are more vast than we ever dreamed,” or even “The first thing to do is to check our measurements and equipment.” It seemed like a failure to apply Ockham’s Razor in a really basic way. In addition, and even allowing for the translation issues, the female characters were unappealing cardboard objects. I was shocked at the praise for the “hard science” and at the awards given the banal plot, action, and characters.

19

This was me in college. I started out as a EE. Then I had a lab where we were to plot the resistance curves of pencil leads. Every time I made reading, the “resistor” changed. The results were not repeatable at all. I think the act of measuring it changed it.

To this day I am not sure if the problem was 1) I was incapable of doing the experiment correctly, 2) the (newly minted) professor was an idiot assigning something impossible, or 3) the point was to realize the task was a “no-win” scenario. The actual result, though, was that I went into a depression and was ready to quit. But instead of quitting (or suiciding) I switched my major to ME and never looked back.

20

Keep in mind, any sci-fi book or show that eschews warp drive in favor of relativistic travel, or that does more than put a cursory nod toward actual space vehicle physics is going to get a lot of kudos as ‘hard sci-fi’, even when it’s not actually hard sci-fi.

The Three Body Problem series is not hard sci-fi. Sure, science is a storytelling focus, but little of it is actually plausible. I mean, the author could have replaced the sophons with Trisolaran sorcery and the story wouldn’t have been much different.