• Au­thor: Liu Cix­in
• Rat­ing: ★ ★ ★ ★
• See in goodreads

Review:

It's very good. It's al­so sur­pris­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to read be­cause of the miss­ing res­o­nance of the cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences. Sure, I know about Marie Curie, but what hap­pens when a char­ac­ter men­tions Wu Chien-Shi­ung "went even fur­ther than Marie Curie"? Sure, she went fur­ther be­cause she be­came a physi­cist af­ter Marie Curie died! Why is she even brought up?

Is that some in­her­ent chi­nese chau­vin­ism in the orig­i­nal tex­t? I have no idea, but I pre­fer to take it as an ex­tra op­por­tu­ni­ty: a nov­el about alien con­tact writ­ten by a mild­ly alien writ­er. Sure, a "re­al" alien would be much dif­fer­en­t, in fact it would prob­a­bly be un­in­tel­li­gi­ble to me. So this is the mild sub­sti­tute.

I liked it a lot.