The Three Body Problem
I've been trying to find a reading genre that really sucks me in, and I think sci-fi is going to be that genre for a while. While I take a break from reading James S. A. Corey's The Expanse - I took a stab at The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and absolutely loved it.
I used to have a problem with sci-fi stories like this because I couldn't find it believable at all - I know too much about science and logic that an outlandish story loses me very quickly. That's part of why I enjoyed this book: Liu sets the stage very early that science in this universe starts out similarly to ours, but goes off the rails very quickly, and it uses enough real scientific concepts that it continues to track instead of jumping all over the place with logic.
I will say, however, that the pacing felt very slow. You didn't really jump into the action of the story until probably 60-70% through the book, which is usually not my favorite. Following this, I am starting the second book in the series (The Dark Forest) and am hoping that starting out after the "prologue" speeds up the storytelling a bit more.
This was a great read for me overall though, and I'll give it 3.75 stars and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a realistic sci-fi story, with some very cool world-building set on-top of real life as a starter template.
P.S. I had heard before that there was a TV show version of the trilogy, and looked it up on Wikipedia. I'm slowly learning that sci-fi TV adaptations aren't ever fantastic - but this one threw out most of the core characters and changed every noun possible! Why can't writers just stick to the source in cases like this?!