The Three-body Problem

After a spate of apparent suicides among elite scientists, nanotech engineer Wang Miao is asked to infiltrate a secretive cabal. During his investigation, Wang is inducted into a mysterious online game that is the key to humanity's place in the cosmos and the key to the extinction-level threat it now faces.

The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest are so good! I loved the first one, which I read in April 2015. I immediately placed a preorder for the second book, and it was even more amazing. I was completely blown away.

There are many good reasons this book won the 2015 Hugo Award. The complexity of the narrative is amazing and the theoretical basis behind the plot is intriguing. Starting off in the heat of the Cultural Revolution, the story takes us across decades and lightyears, with action, theory and a simulation game. The narrative structure was a pleasure to explore and holds up the bold scope of the plot.

This is an astounding hard-SF novel. Cixin Liu manages to evoke the strangeness and beauty of our universe. It's the story of what would happen if humanity made contact with an alien civilization set in the background of the Cultural Revolution and modern-day China. This book is an enormous bestseller in China and, having finally read the translation, I can now say it is well deserved. If Stanley Kubrick were still alive this is the kind of story he would have loved to turn into a movie.