THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM The Remembrance of Earth's Past, Book 1

This new production of the Chinese sci-fi epic may be Rosalind Chao's first turn as an audiobook narrator, but you'd never know it. The veteran actor navigates long stretches of speculative physics and descriptions of shocking violence as ably as she voices colloquies among the characters. Listeners who come to the work from the Netflix adaptation will find Chao's warm, familiar tones--she plays astrophysicist Ye Wenjie in the series--carrying them into the Chinese milieu of the source story. She narrates with restraint, never overplaying Ye's increasing alienation or nanotechnologist Wang Miao's distress as mysterious phenomena hint at doom to come. Chao's brisk, no-nonsense evocation of the foulmouthed detective Da Shi as he connects the dots to reveal an alien invasion harks back to gumshoes of yore. V.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2024]