Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don’t get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
Aliens live on a planet orbiting three suns. The planet regularly gets scorched by those suns. Hot enough to melt rocks. How tf these aliens keep evolving and advancing all the way to space travel?
It is utterly ridiculous.
Rant incoming
The three body problem is chaotic dynamical system. Chaotic means, between other things, that it is unpredictable: given two different starting points, even incredibly close, their behavior will diverge (become different) exponentially fast over time (and we saw during the Covid epidemic that exponentially fast is really damn fast).
So having a super smart mathematician approximating its simulation… that’s a load of bullshit, hot and steamy. That’s a master level example of how not to spend your days, because any approximation you do is going to impact your results exponentially fast.
Furthermore, the three body problem’s solutions don’t need to be bounded. What does this mean? That there is no reason for the planet to stay in orbit of the three suns. Any time it gets far, it could come back, but just as easily keep going further away and lose connection with its starting system. Any time it gets near the suns it could just as easily fall into one of them. So, most likely, during geological ages, the planet would have either gotten ejected or eaten up. If you want to go even further back, there is no way an asteroid belt would generate a planet in these conditions.
Finally, there are well-known configurations of solutions of the three body problem. Configurations are very specific situations (usually assuming two suns of equal mass and a sun that is much smaller and much further away) that can sustain periodic solutions, aka behaviors that repeat after a certain time. If a planet ever got generated in a three suns system, it would definitely need to be in one of these configurations.
The nail in the coffin: if there are three suns and a planet… it’s the four body problem. If you consider the planet to have basically zero mass with respect to the suns, you call it the restricted four body problem.
And this is why knowing way more than the author spoils the fun :( I could not enjoy the science part at all… even when i tried to suspend my disbelief.
Exactly what keeps me from writing anything, which is silly, but I hate the idea of somebody reading something I wrote and thinking, “what an idiot” 😔
Oh, I am sorry… but you can see this thread: even if there are quite some inaccuracy on the math and physics side of things, many people still really enjoyed this book (my partner included, even after hearing my rant many time). You should not censor yourself! (But accept criticism and improve from it). You go gender-neutral-guy!
Haha, thank you, I appreciate the sentiment! I recognize that this is a Me Problem, but in classic fashion I think I can overcome this, too, with just a little bit of self-improvement in a slightly new area of expertise. I mean really, how hard could it be?
I read/watch popular but stupid stuff to remind myself things don’t need to be accurate to be entertaining.
Easy. DEHYDRATE!
Here’s how I understand it to work.
They have random periods of activity in which they advance as a species so they make large leaps in scientific progress when they are awake as opposed to a slow and steady build up of knowledge. Their large leaps in advancements becomes a disadvantage at times but more so their way of thinking in general.
Because they kinda portray themselves as humanoid that’s how you’re lead to think about them, like approximately human sized smart mamal-ish creatures, when really they are between ant to beetle sized hive mind creatures. This is why the more of them that they are able to have active between the harsh sun cycles the faster they advance. Also makes the whole dehydration thing easier to swallow.
And how do Trisolarians manage to transfer knowledge from one stable era to the next? The surface of the planet literally burns during the chaotic era. Which begs another question, how do they rehydrate? With what water?
They just gather their dragon balls, obviously!