It's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.

What is “proper” vs eg the others on this list? Honest question.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction

Did you read the wiki link? There's very little, and much of it is more kafka-esque political commentary rather than hard scifi.

I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.

Thank you. It’s amazing that +1bn people with theoretical access to the world’s resources didn’t spontaneously create 10000 sci-fi books. Similar isolation the other way around. Societies are still so isolated (language, culture, political leanings) despite so much integration.

>theoretical access to the world’s resources

There's the rub. Access to the world's cultural resources is highly limited in China. They've outright firewalled the internet.

I don't think that's true either. I think it was just the first such to get translated to English. I think it's popular because the premise is interesting. The Dark Forest is just part of the vocabulary now, and that's not an accident, it's genuinely worth thinking about and, if not technically new, at least newly popularized.

On a "technicality" front, I'm sure you could find something if you dug through the archives, but really there was no hard modern scifi in China that was heavily published and got any traction until TBP. The party even discouraged fantasy media. I lived there and hung out with nerds, and they were ecstatic when the book came out.

Did you read all three? The first one isn't great but as a trilogy I found it quite good. There are several places where the story building contradicts itself but if you are willing to look past those then it's solid science fiction. It's not on the level of Arthur C. Clarke or Asimov but they were obviosly big influences.

I found the first the best, second unbearable, and third absolutely not worth it given the slog of dark forest.

Liu's writing is incredible, but he reminds me of George RR Martin or.....bare with me..Vince McMahon. Unable to get beyond the "fleshing out" phase.

Same, it was nearly impossible to finish due to it being so dull.

I had the exact opposite thought - the first book was interesting and thought-provoking, while the other two just piled on more and more scifi concepts that (imo) have been better explored by other authors.

No. I was ready to give up on the first one about a third of the way through but people told me "it gets good later"; it didn't. So when I hear people saying that about the trilogy it's a bit of a "fool me once, shame on you" situation.

It brings me sanity to hear others say this. I thought the story was convoluted and characters uninteresting.

It was tedious, but so was Herodotus. Tedious does not mean uninteresting ...TBP was very interesting; especially the takedown of group-think revolutionary marxists. For example, and purposely vague to avoid spoilage, the young female guard's behavior echoes much of what we're seeing in today's colleges.

Read Born Red for a first hand account of such follies. We in the West love to pretend inconvenient history doesn’t exist.

Well, you know, that's just your opinion, man.