The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Translated by Ken Liu)
Book of the Week: 3 July 2016
This week’s book has been chosen by Alexander, a keen reader in Year 9. It is a book for adults that won the 2015 Hugo Award for the best science fiction or fantasy book. The book’s blurb reads as follows:
“1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China’s Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang’s investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredicatable interaction of its three suns.
This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists’ deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.”
Alexander recommends it by saying: “The Three-Body Problem is a science-fiction book that starts in revolutionary China. It then goes on to include nanoscience and a planet with three suns. I would recommend it to those of you who have reading stamina because it is not a short book and the type is relatively small. It also contains a lot of complex, scientific words.”
