The Three Body Problem is the best piece of hard science fiction I've read this year. At first I thought I'd have issues keeping track of the Chinese names because it seemed like there were so many characters and some had nicknames (aka the Anna Karenina problem), but as the story went on it became clear that it was all the same people, just over an immense time span. The narrative style is at times dry and didactic. It felt like I was reading a history book written in the far future and translated back into English. But now that I've finished, I think the unusual narrative style is part of the fun. The translator's note at the end actually shed some light on it: he deliberately tried to keep the feeling that this was a different literary tradition.

Despite the quibbles, The Three Body Problem gets four stars from me for the story and characters. I don't want to say too much about the story because its slow unfolding is a huge part of the fun. In some ways it's a traditional human-alien first contact story. But in many other ways it completely defied my expectation of how that kind of story would unfold. The three main characters, Ye, Wang, and Da Shi are all fully developed people, and their complex personalities are what pulled me into the book first.

The aliens are great. Just so damn alien. Also this book features the best use of a videogame as a story telling device I've seen yet. And despite the long, didactic passages about complex scientific and mathematical concepts, and the foreignness of Chinese culture to me as an American reader, Three Body is an extremely accessible book. It's no wonder it won the Hugo this year.

I recommend it to people who like hard science fiction, are interested in physics, and are interested in China (any combination of the above)