The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem is a 2008 novel by the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin, and the first book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. It was serialised in Science Fiction World in 2006 before being published as a book, and it took the Galaxy Award for Chinese science fiction that year. The English translation by Ken Liu appeared in 2014 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015.

During China's Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, watches her father die after being beaten at a struggle session. Sentenced to a labour camp as a political outcast, she is instead recruited to Red Coast, a secret military project that is trying to make contact with life beyond Earth. The decision she makes there sends a signal that will not be answered for decades.

Years later, a string of researchers dies and a nanotech engineer is recruited by the police to work out why, following the trail to an online game set in a world with three suns, where civilisations have been destroyed and rebuilt over and over. The trilogy invents a past, present and future in which Earth meets a civilisation from a nearby system of three stars orbiting one another, which is what makes the orbital mechanics of the three-body problem matter to the story.

Liu moves between the physics at the centre of the story and its human cost, and between the factions forming on Earth as the news spreads: the ones who want to welcome the visitors and the ones who intend to fight them. The trilogy continues in The Dark Forest and Death's End.