The Three-Body Problem

It opens in the Cultural Revolution with an astrophysicist watching her father get beaten to death by his own students, and honestly that’s the bit that sets the tone for the whole trilogy, not the aliens. Ye Wenjie winds up at a secret radio observatory, catches a message from a civilisation telling her plainly not to reply because they’ll come and take the planet, and she replies. Not ideal. Four centuries of countdown later the rest of us get scientists killing themselves, a physics that has quietly stopped behaving itself, and a VR game about a world with three suns that keeps burning its own history back to zero. The three-body problem of the title is a real bit of orbital mechanics with no general solution, and Liu builds an entire civilisation’s psychology out of the fact that it can’t be solved.

As bleak as all that sounds, it’s absolutely gripping, mostly because of people like Da Shi. While everyone stares up at the sky, he keeps his feet well and truly on the ground.