The Three-Body Problem

It opens during the Cultural Revolution, with a physicist beaten to death at a struggle session in front of his daughter for teaching relativity. Ye Wenjie survives, is sent to a labour brigade, and ends up at a secret military installation in Inner Mongolia with an enormous antenna, where she makes a decision about humanity that the rest of the trilogy proceeds from.

In the present, a nanomaterials researcher named Wang Miao is pulled into an investigation by a spectacularly rude policeman. Physicists are killing themselves. The results of fundamental experiments have stopped being consistent. And a strange immersive video game keeps presenting players with a planet whose sun rises unpredictably, where civilisations grow and then burn or freeze, and where the players are asked to solve the motion of three suns, a problem with no general solution.

Cixin Liu is interested in the physics and the civilisational arithmetic far more than in his characters, who mostly serve as positions in an argument. If you need interiority, this is not that. If you want a novel that follows a hard idea all the way to its most uncomfortable conclusion, there is very little like it.

The game sections are the most inventive part: players meet Mozi, Newton, Von Neumann and the First Emperor, and at one point build a working computer out of thirty million soldiers holding flags, a set piece that has become the book's most quoted passage.

Ken Liu's translation keeps the Chinese literary register rather than smoothing it into American house style, and includes footnotes explaining historical references, which is part of why the book reads as unmistakably not written for a Western reader.

The Cultural Revolution scenes remain the strongest writing in it.

Around four hundred pages, and the first of a trilogy that gets very much stranger and larger. Best for readers who want ideas at maximum scale and will forgive thin characters to get them.