| == Spoilers for the first book == I tell everyone to skip the first one. The problem is that when you hear of the series, it sounds so cool. "What if humanity knew aliens were arriving in ~X hundred years?" But it takes until the end of the first book for that to premise to even arrive. You can read a summary of the first book, and go directly to the second, which has a different set of characters on a different timeline. All the cool stuff in the first book: 1. The alien planet is at the mercy of 2 suns, so it deals with extreme heat and cold. Predicting the trajectory of their planet (the "three-body problem" in question) is a life-or-death problem. 2. To solve this, the aliens set up computers using a lot of alien-people, each
acting as a logic gate - each person passes information to the next. 3. A pro-alien group uses lasers to cut up ships at the Panama canal or whatever. Pretty much the rest of the book is quite boring. The pro-alien society that meets in a video game is laughable. The second book has a propulsive cadence that's super fun to read, and the third has a series of amazing conceptually-creative micro-worlds - so captivating! |