The Three-Body Problem

This is the Hugo Winner for 2015. It's by the most beloved SF writer in China, translated by Ken Liu, an award winning author himself. It's the first of a trilogy that is somewhat reminiscent of "Ender's Game" and "Contact". The novel is fairly complex, with a lot of setup to explain where some of the characters come from and the context of the society in which the search for extraterrestrial life begins in China. The main plot follows Wang Miao as he tries to infiltrate a scientific organization, the ETO, for the government, and to explain why he is seeing a countdown first on photos he's taking, then later in his field of vision. In doing so, he comes across a game called Three Body. Its primary goal is to figure out how a civilization can survive on a planet that revolves around three suns, a classic physics problem. Through the game and his contacts within it, he discovers that the world is on a path of destruction abetted by the scientists playing the game.

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