A few weeks back I borrowed three novels from Zahira. She got them back in 2019, I think it was, using some book tokens I gave her. They comprise a trilogy generally known as The Three-Body Problem, which is the title of the first one. It struck me then as a bit of an odd choice, but a very interesting one: hard sci-fi, originating from China, the writer being one Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, more appropriately, I guess.)
I'm not sure how far Zahira got with the trilogy, but I don't think it was too far. I know she found it difficult to follow the narrative just at the level of the sheer number of characters involved and how tricky it was to remember their names. So I asked to borrow the novels since they were lying fallow, as it were.
I've just finished the first one and found it tough going in the initial stages, but rewarding when I got the hang of how it worked. The characterisation is wafer-thin, but that doesn't matter. It's the ideas that count and these are wild and wonderful. I'm guessing they'll keep me going through the next two volumes, and I'll need that help since I'm just thirty or so pages into The Dark Forest and very much lost.
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