The Three-Body Problem
A physicist's suicide, a mysterious game, and first contact with a dying alien civilization open this landmark of Chinese science fiction.
The opening volume of Liu Cixin’s Hugo-winning trilogy begins during China’s Cultural Revolution and spirals outward into one of the boldest first-contact stories ever written. A secret military project reaches into the cosmos and receives an answer, while on Earth a hallucinatory virtual game called Three Body hides the truth about a doomed alien world. Blending hard physics with sweeping imagination, it became the first translated novel to win science fiction’s top prize, and one of the books Mark Zuckerberg chose for his A Year of Books club.
Recommended by 2 People
Slavoj Žižek
In Liu's masterpiece, Earth is confronted with a planet whose unpredictable suns cause severe temperature shifts. I see it as Earth in the near future: Are we facing something for which the only appropriate term is "the end of nature"?
Source · May 2026
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