Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Alright. I read this wrong. It's all on me.
I've got my Cone of Shame and am headed to the Shame Corner right now.
It was nice being out for awhile but we all knew I couldn't stay out for long.

I'm not sure if something was lost in translation, if I'm just really not good at science, or if I am waaaaay too American, but whatever the case, I did not enjoy this.

Well, I did, but only through maybe the first half. Then it got tedious, then it got boring, then it got downright ridiculous, and then I stabbed my ears out so I wouldn't have to listen anymore.

The story follows two timelines and characters that you know are going to intersect.
It starts with (phonetically-spelled, based on the reader's terrible pronunciation): Astrophysicist Yeah Wen-Sia who sees her father killed by three fanatic teenage girls when he won't deny science during the Cultural Revolution. Then, her favorite and best teacher commits suicide, her mother, who is terribly unstable, abandons her, and her sister has joined the Revolution and is a fanatic in her own right. Ye is angry and carries this anger with her to the woods where she is employed in deforestation at the base of Red Coast Station which is, essentially, a military base with a huge satellite that sits up on top of a hill and is fairly inaccessible and anyone who even strolls near will be shot.

The second storyline is that of (phonetically-spelled, based on the reader's terrible pronunciation) Wong Meow, owner of zero personality. He's a nanotech/biology somesuch researcher scientist in the current day who is alarmed when the nation's top physicists and other brainy sorts start committing suicide. I don't really remember, if I ever actually knew, how he falls into all of this, but he gets involved, via a tough-as-nails cop named Dah Shee, with a sort of investigation into the larger scope of the problem that is causing these scientists to kill themselves.
Through a series of not-noticeable events, Wang finds out about an online game called Three Body and he decides to play. It's a weird game that follows civilizations as they grow and then collapse on a world where there are three suns and these suns pose a real-life (like, real to our lives) mathematical quandary called the Three Body Problem in which three things whiz around a stationary object (I think. I may be making the stationary object up) but each has a different kind of orbit and they're sort of random and you must find the pattern of their zoomings to predict when they'll be close to each other or the object and when they'll be farthest apart, etc. How can you track the movement of these three bodies to predict what they'll do next, is the question. At any rate, if you solve the Three Body Problem in the game, you win. Only really smart people can play this game, obviously. People whose brains think in spatial relationships and numbers at all hours of the day, I assume.

There are more characters but these are the main two and their lives intersect and things happen.

Before I spew forth my list of what I misunderstood, I'm going to share what I thought I was going to read.

The Direction In Which I Thought This Book Would Go: (view spoiler)[Someone, namely Yeah Wen-Sia, bent on revenge against humanity, reached out to SPAAAACE during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Aliens got the message and replied. Some aliens want to conquer us because of course but others send us the Three Body game as an introduction to their history and to build sympathy so that we offer them solace in our system or, at the very least, help them with their three body problem. The Tri-Solarans race to see who gets here first and one of the groups manages to send two protons to Earth. But are they protons or are they actually ships/bacteria/something sinister from aliens? What do they do? Why were they sent?
Chaos ensues as the Good Aliens try to help those of us who want to save Earth fend off the Bad Aliens - all the same race, just different factions - and their human allies who think people should be eradicated because they destroy everything. The Bad Aliens don't want us to spread throughout the galaxies because, again, we destroy everything so they must destroy us first. The Good Aliens want to colonize us and live here because their own homeworld is in peril due to the unpredictability of their crazyass suns. We lose no matter what but is it better to be enslaved or to be eliminated?
Yeah leads one side while Wong leads the other and there's an epic rap battle at the end! WHO WON! WHO'S NEXT? (hide spoiler)]

What Actually Happened and Why I Lost Interest: (view spoiler)[Ye reached out, bent on revenge, then made up an entire alien race based on one reply she received eight years after her accidental Message to the Universe was sent. Someone created a game based on Ye’s made-up alien race and scientist-types played it to solve a math problem but then went mad (it may have been the protons) and killed themselves. Maybe the Adventists, one of three cult factions that formed in regard to First Contact, were behind the game because they were actually the only ones receiving information from the aliens and, presumably, giving info back. The game was won but then the nature of the game changed and players found out there had been multiple inhabited worlds and now there was only one because the suns kept bumping into the worlds and destroying them and the one that was still left was doomed and the TriSolarans (those are the people from the game and also the aliens who have been talking to China) want to move here and also want to kill us and the new End Game is to get TriSolarans to invent space travel. Then there was a big philosophical political thinkpiece over on the alien world that we got to hear and it was slapstickedly represented and then there was talking and something else happened I couldn’t quite grasp, all of it built on a foundation of theoretical physics. Then we were back on Earth and a battle was about to begin. I think. (hide spoiler)]

And here are the things I just did not understand at all: (view spoiler)[
1) The computer game. I actually loved it. It was really intriguing. Wong had to wear a haptic suit (like in Ready Player One) in the game, though I don't actually know why except to feel the extreme temperatures but ok, that's fine. There are extreme temperature fluctuations in this game and that's probably important plus it's fun to say "haptic suit." But here's the thing. The game is about the fall of civilization when a chaotic event occurs and wipes everything out and the further civilization can build, the closer it can get to solving the Three Body Problem and winning the game. I thought it was a multi-player game and it seems there is some crossover because players in and out of game recognize Wang but it also seems everyone has to play their own version of the game. At first, I thought everyone was a player and wondered what they did while they were dehydrated - did they just log in and sit there, being dehydrated in a stack of other dehydrated people? (during chaos times, all but a skeleton crew dehydrates and gets stored in dehydration silos. That way, during stable times, everyone (and thing) can be rehydrated to work on civilization. Yay!) But then another player said she'd gone through 203 civilizations when Wong had only experienced 194, or something, and while everyone knew his in-game character, he knew no others, so...ok, confused. Just how does this online game work, people?
2) How many people know there's been contact with other sentient life out in the universe? Apparently, a lot of people because there are cultish factions built around the idea of the Tri-Solarans: The Adventists who want humanity wiped out, the Redemptionists who want to help The Lord solve the Three Body Problem OR let the Tri-Solarans come live here peacefully just as long as everyone stays alive and unenslaved. Probably. And the Survivors. Those are all the lower-class, poor people who just want to keep living. The militaries and governments of some of Europe and of America (but not Canada or South America, apparently) all get together and talk about the upcoming war. The Chinese police force are aware of the incoming danger. And yet, supposedly, it's not widely known that intelligent life has responded to queries...What?
3) Ok. Math. I suck at it, I admit, but help me out here. Ye sent her message and eight years later, she got a reply. However, The Listener got the original message and is the one who sent back the "Don't reply, you dumbass" message and then they get a reply, like, half an hour later. And suddenly, the two worlds are essentially emailing back and forth. Apparently. How'd that work?
Related: The TriSolarans are on their way to Earth, right? They've sent two protons to ahead of them, kind of Trojan protons and I didn't understand what that was all about but whatever. They got two protons here, probably using their email service. It was probably sent as a pdf, or something. The point being, they got here fast because they could travel fast. However, the ship the TriSolarans are traveling to Earth in will take 450 years to get here because while it can drive 10 times the speed of light, it can't keep that up and has to do a lot of coasting. Yet people are all freaking out over this bunch of aliens who will be here in just under half a century. But then the Judgement Day ship - and I assume that's an alien ship? - shows up and is sliced to pieces at the Panama Canal. Where the hell did the Judgement Day ship come from?? What happened? Someone please explain this to me? I don't understand how time works! Actually, I think I must have missed an entire chapter in which the Judgement Day ship was explained because I have no idea what went on there.
4) The sliced ship brings me to my next item of contention. How did humans know where the ship was going to show up? They had discussed different places to set up this crazy nanofilament trap (how did they set that up, by the way, without slicing up everything the filaments touched?) because they needed certain environmental factors to be met but none of those factors were where the ship may dock. So they set it up across the Panama Canal and voila! The ship appears. I don't even know where it came from. The sky? Was it an ocean liner? What was this ship and who was on it and how'd it get to the Panama Canal? EXPLAIN!
5) So we get to meet the Tri-Solarans (I think. I mean, I suppose we could have been seeing mainly what was going on in Ye's head as she read the love letters that went back and forth from Earth to TriSolaria) and they're a little bit silly. They sounded like a Monty Python sketch about high-falutin' types who take themselves too seriously. Anyway, they decide they can't actually do any better living on Earth but they'll wipe us out anyway because we're going to become a disease later on so they may as well do the universe a favor. What kind of logic is that? They're on the brink of extinction and they decide we should go, too? But before they do that, they have to make us stop having science because if we don't, we'll be able to beat their asses by the time they get here. Interestingly enough, there is only one kind of science in the universe because what we can see, hear, smell...all the things we can sense are the only things that exist in the entirety of space and time so TriSolaran science and Earthling science are the same which is why they understand how far we've come and how far we'll get in another 450 years and so they must stop our science for their own safety. This is all based on information I assume the Adventists emailed to them over their years of loving correspondence? I...what?
An aside: Thank goodness Mike Evans died pointing to the computers that housed the secret alien emails. Because why wouldn't you be toting those along with you to the Panama Canal, amirite? (hide spoiler)]

Ok, so, it's obvious this went WAY over my head. Way way way over. I'm probably too inculturated in Western SciFi to be able to appreciate what I listened to. And, by the way, what I listened to was crap because, yet again, the narrator is some white dude who doesn't speak Chinese. Also, he made the Chinese tough-as-nails cop's voice alternate between a NYC beat cop accent and a Texan accent. It was bizarre. I did not enjoy that at all.

I've read several of the other five-star reviews here and I've yet to find any enlightenment on my misunderstandings. I'm just seeing a lot of people going nuts over how amazing this is and I can't understand, even from their glowing reviews, what they read that I didn't.

This is the first in a trilogy. I feel like I should listen to them all just to find out if any of my questions are answered but I'm not really into self-torture so probably, I'll pass.