“From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert… I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace.”

-Cixin Liu

Many of you are probably familiar with The Three-Body Problem, in name if nothing else. Barack Obama mentioned that the series (Rememberance of Earth’s Past) was one of his favorites back in 2017. A Netflix adaptation is also in production, led by producers from Game of Thrones (which Obama turned down an offer to cameo in).

Really, in recommending The Three-Body Problem, I’m recommending the entire Remembrance trilogy—after the first one, you’ll need to pick up the next two! The first book is one I’d categorize as a “hard start,” in that there are a lot of names, a time jump, and (for some of us) a quick crash course in Chinese history. None of it is unnecessary, or even necessarily placed wrong, but it does make the first few chapters take longer to get through than some other sci-fi books that just throw you into the action. Once the action starts, though, I was all in. Liu takes some creative twists and turns throughout the trilogy that left me pondering possible outcomes for different scenarios, how I would think to solve problems, and whether the outcomes of the book would happen in real life. Like I said in my Instagram post, this is a book/series I still think about deeply several years later.

On top of that, the English translation (by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen) is phenomenal!