todb reviewed The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Three-Body Trilogy, #1)
Within the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a military project sends messages to alien …
Ultramodern cosmic horror with loads of astrophysics
4 stars
Got a cold, so had loads of time to finish Three Body Problem. It was kind of a slog for me about 20% of the way through, but the beginning (set in the Chinese Cultural Revolution) and the mainline story was pretty darn gripping. This is about as hard of hard sci-fi as you're going to find, and I'm looking forward to being aggravated by the Netflix version. Also, many people warn that this first book of the trilogy doesn't have an ending, but I didn't see that at all -- the ending is just appropriately nihilistic, as anything set on a cosmic scale ought to be.
Anyway, this is about as spoiler-free as I can make this comment. I will say that between this and @strcpy@infosec.exchange's recent posts, I'm most definitely back into #Stellaris, with pre-FTL civilizations cranked up.