The Three-Body Problem is one of few Chinese science fiction novels to be translated into English, and the first to win the Hugo Award, with Ken Liu’s translation in 2015. While the book is undoubtedly hard science fiction, this should not discourage the uninitiated. At the heart of the novel is a game that simulates the planet Trisolaris, a world terrorized by its three suns. The game is played by protagonist Wang Miao who detects, under its illusory and simplistic surface, an “enormous information content… hidden deep”. This is how the book itself should be considered. The novel posits an elaborate but satisfying blend of real physics and the fantastical, while the plot traverses Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of 1967, modern day China and an alien world hell-bent on colonizing Earth. This is science fiction that should keep any Gene Wolfe or H. G. Wells fan happy. A few chapters in, however, blunt realism and analogy combine to create a novel that is as profound as it is epic in scope. The reader is immersed in everything from nanoscience to world history. The hilarity of Isaac Newton building a human computer for Qin Shi Huang, for example, is punctured by a meditation on the human cost of technological progress. Ken Liu’s prose is stunning, without compromising the idiomatic charm of Liu Cixin’s original. Translator’s notes aid those unfamiliar with Chinese history and scientific scholarship. While the physics can be a bit elaborate for those of us without a mathematical brain, a cast of complex and endearing characters is more than enough to maintain momentum and see the reader to the end of what is one of the finest science fiction novels from the last decade, in any language.