Chinese author Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM is certainly an intriguing piece of science fiction, rich in ideas if thin in plot and characterization. A mixed bag, though on the whole I quite enjoyed it as something bold and original.

The plot description is pretty simple. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project ends up communicating with an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. Forced to emigrate, this civilization decides to travel to Earth. During the long wait, factions form on Earth, some planning to welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as irredeemably corrupt, and others planning to resist.

At first, I thought this was an alien contact story set during the Cold War, with a Maoist China making first contact, but the Cultural Revolution only serves as the backdrop for the genesis story. The story soon jumps ahead in time to the present day to a new protagonist, a scientist struggling with a string of connected mysteries that lead him to the truth about the aliens.

Reading reviews, I noticed that some readers criticized the mostly tell and not show plot, wooden dialogue, and thin characterization, and I can’t argue with any of that. For example, the protagonist has a wife and son we meet near the beginning but pretty much never hear of again. Where the novel excels is in its ideas, sense of a scientific mystery, and beginnings in the what can only be called insanely turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. These elements really grabbed me, and while I didn’t particularly care about the characters aside from perhaps the clever but obnoxious cop, I stayed glued to the page to see where all these crazy ideas were going to take me.

So overall, I’d call THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM a highly enjoyable and original piece of science fiction, particularly enjoyable for its density of intriguing, interconnected ideas.

Phil Klay’s REDEPLOYMENT is a collection of short stories about men serving in Iraq and Afghanistan or readjusting to civilian life. Brutal, raw, honest, and so nuanced it throws the very idea of PC out the window, it’s a brilliant analysis of humans at war and how war breaks everything.

Each of the twelve stories is told by a nameless veteran in first person. We don’t get to know them very well except through their experience, how it affects them, and how they describe it, providing a very intimate snapshot of a person’s life in or after war. Some of the narrators were directly in the thick of it while others at its periphery, though all in one way or another are affected.

What’s remarkable about these stories, written by a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and conducted enormous research into war experiences of fellow veterans, is how raw and honest they are. The soldiers in his stories aren’t lionized as gung-ho, flag-waving, earnest young men, nor are they portrayed as utterly virtuous but pitifully broken pawns. No kid gloves here, and you’ll find no comforting and childish stereotypes. Popular political narratives on all sides are frankly challenged (and wrecked), though there’s no apparent political agenda on the part of the author aside from asking the reader to see these veterans as real people, take it or leave it and make up your own mind, an approach I found utterly refreshing. Nothing is contrived in each story, which simply tells it like it is from one veteran’s point of view, with all the good, the bad, the ugly, and the horrifying.

The moral of each story can be difficult to grasp, as it’s highly nuanced. Generally, there are themes of whether morality can co-exist with war, all shades of guilt and fear, survival, helplessness when death can come at any time by pure chance, and the struggle to find meaning in what was essentially chaos. In one story, a veteran who supports a friend who survived horrible burns finds himself caring but envious, in another a veteran takes on a comrade’s guilt over shooting an armed child to the point it becomes real to him, and in another a priest struggles to comfort a unit that has utterly demonized the enemy and is shooting civilians. The stories are tragic, delivered frankly and without judgment, and seem to focus on the idea that once war gets in your head, it can be difficult for some to get rid of it. They’re also very procedural, providing what at least appears to be an authentic view from the front lines of the global war on terror.

Overall, this civilian found the stories disturbing, thoughtful, powerful, and moving. I recommend the read.

Phil Klay’s MISSIONARIES is a hell of an interesting read, though it often works better on a nonfiction rather than on a literary level. Let me explain.

Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the author of REDEPLOYMENT, a collection about veterans that earned enormous accolades. MISSIONARIES is a fairly ambitious followup, the result of six years of research. In this novel, a war reporter in Afghanistan, war veterans turned military contractors, narcos, paramilitaries, and intelligence officers in Colombia evaluate, experience, and try to counter the endless cycle of violence and drug trafficking.

The story contains a great deal of fascinating information, written with authority and flair and backed by solid research. It has a documentary feel to it at some points, a brooding SICARIO feel at other points. I love how Klay doesn’t posit easy answers or inject a moral narrative. He just tells you how it is, and how it is is very, very complicated. For me, this is where the novel really shines, in how it holds up for inspection a slice of the War on Drugs as an endless, cyclical war. This is my favorite kind of fiction, where I learn something without feeling like I’m in school, and where I’m exposed to engaging and interesting ideas, of which MISSIONARIES has plenty.

Where the novel works less for me is there are a lot of characters, and despite connections here and there, they don’t really tie together until deep into the last act. I don’t mind a sprawling story, but it needs to tie together thematically early on and eventually through the plot, ideally sooner than near the end. MISSIONARIES has a theme, though I’m not sure what it is other than the War on Drugs became the War on Terror and is now one unending global war, often fought outside the news headlines. Each of the characters is in one way or another an elite playing their part in the game, and we never see them face any real moral dilemmas about the dirty game they’re playing. And the way everything ties together, with a central conflict that doesn’t reveal itself until the last act and then gets resolved pretty quickly and without much fuss, makes this novel more a powerful snapshot of people and ideas than a coherent narrative.

So overall, A+ for ideas and good storytelling at the ground level, more a B or B- for characters and the way the story comes together. In short, I liked it a lot for its positive qualities, and I’m gonna check out his REDEPLOYMENT.