Science Fiction often gets categorized somewhere on a scale between two categories. On the one end is "hard" SciFi, where a lot of energy is spent on making sure the Science checks out and plot is often propelled forward by the constraints of technical limitations. The other end is formed by "soft" SciFi that operates under the mantra "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and wants to mainly look at what impact yet unknown challenges that arise from the use of those technologies might have on our society.
For some reason I came into the book expecting pretty hard SciFi. It's not. In fact, the whole book's premise seems to be based on three fatal misconceptions:
1. Yes, Alpha Centauri is (likely) a trisolarian system. However, only the inner two stars are close to what Liu describes. They orbit each other in varying distances somewhere in the range between Sun-Saturn and Sun-Pluto (for reference: That's a couple of light minutes). The third sun is a lot smaller and orbits the other two stars at a distance of around 0.2 light years. It affects the other two stars about as much as Earth affects the Sun and so far outside the gravitational well of the two star system looks exactly like the one from a single star with twice the mass.
2. Nobody needs an analytical solution to the 3-body-problem to calculate the relevant future. You know the laws of physics, you can measure the position and velocity of your suns. Don't quote me on this but I'm pretty sure a 1990s computer could within weeks calculate a Million years into the future with not very large margin of error. What else would you possibly need? You can't tell me a civilization that has the technology to edge circuits into an unfolded Proton can't do some simple numerical integration!
3. Why exactly do they need an inhabitet planet? Couldn't they just send ships to all nearby stars with planets in the habitable zone? They live under always changing conditions, so I'd imagine their definition of "habitable zone" even is broader than ours. What's this obsession with other species?
I don't mind the "Sophons" (that's the sufficiently-advanced-technology-excuse); I don't mind the "sun as amplifier"-thing (I'm not a solar physicist but I don't think it's proven that this might not be a possibility, although extremely unlikely); I do mind that game a bit, that was clearly imagined by somebody who rarely to never plays games, but not enough to let it reflect negatively on the book as a whole; however, I do mind when SciFi just straight out ignores science while trying to be scientific.
But, hold on, am I being unfair here? Am I judging the book by the wrong standards? Is the book not supposed to be hard SciFi? Well, the thing is, it also largely fails as a soft SciFi book. It asks no questions. It offers no new thoughts. It blatantly spews some standard demonization of environmental destruction and then does not even stand by those by having the ETO "fabricate" fear of ecological collapse. It offers some half-baked thought-scraps on how Trisolarians have no culture and little emotion in order to be able to survive only to in the same chapter feeling the need to send propaganda about dying worlds to their own people. The reaction of Earthers to the existence of Aliens is only explored through the doomsday cult ETO; the military officials do not share their thoughts and Wang seems to take the confirmation of intelligent outside Earth with a remarkable shrug.
Okay, is it at least a good story then, ignoring the genre? It's okay-ish, I guess. The characters (except Ye) are walking cliches, the cafe-shooting is ridiculously bad and the pacing of the book after that scene is very weird. I liked the first couple of chapters, though; in fact, I liked them so much, that I'll probably read some more novels set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Has this novel any redeeming qualities at all? Well, actually, yes: Liu paints beautiful pictures. While the unfolding of the proton is a bit over the top, there are beautiful pictures such as the hourglass that is carried through the desert, dehydrated bodies being thrown into lakes, a planet falling apart under gravitational pull from above or the slicing of a tanker. I also liked how he used the exact same words to describe how Ye looked at her transceiver signal and how the listening post on Trisolaris looked at their transceiver signal. It would be interesting to read the Chinese original to see how Liu describes the more mundane moments. Does he have one of those rare styles, where the words themselves somehow invoke something (think, for the lack of better examples jumping to my mind, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", where I could read any passage completely out of context and immediately get that mood of "I have to carry on because of the little one")? The English version most certainly does not. Do languages like Chinese or Japanese (are there other symbols=words languages?) even allow for such thing? I'll probably never know...
So, overall, what do I think of the novel? It gets a big fat "Mediocre" from me and I do absolutely not understand how it could get all the appraisal and awards it got. I will probably not read the other two books in the series.