I read the first and while the ideas explored were interesting, I found the writing itself to be completely off-putting:
- first of all, Three Body seems like the most boring videogame ever developed, not sure how people could actually be believably playing that.
- the characters are pretty much caricatures of stereotypes (the cop), or just plain uninteresting.
- the massive exposure/infodump chapters killed the immersion from me, especially the ones written from the point of view of the other side of the conflict: it really felt like the author was getting towards the end and wanted to Explain All The Things, but couldn't find a subtle way to do so within the narrative, therefore decided to just vomit it all in a single spurt.
I was really looking forward to it but found it disappointing, won't read any more from this author.
Agreed, it's some of the worst prose I've ever read. Since I don't read Mandarin, I can't know how much of it can be blamed on the author and how much on the translator. There are some really interesting ideas in the novel but also some patently absurd ones, not to mention the terrible dialogue and characters.
I felt the same. I wonder if some of these issues stem from the fact that the book was originally written in Chinese (iirc)... maybe some of the infodump sections seem more natural in the original tongue?
- first of all, Three Body seems like the most boring videogame ever developed, not sure how people could actually be believably playing that.
- the characters are pretty much caricatures of stereotypes (the cop), or just plain uninteresting.
- the massive exposure/infodump chapters killed the immersion from me, especially the ones written from the point of view of the other side of the conflict: it really felt like the author was getting towards the end and wanted to Explain All The Things, but couldn't find a subtle way to do so within the narrative, therefore decided to just vomit it all in a single spurt.
I was really looking forward to it but found it disappointing, won't read any more from this author.