I don't read a lot of hard sci fi these days, but my library's summer reading program asks us to read something translated into English, and I'd heard about Liu Cixin's award-winning The Three-Body Problem enough that it was on my reading radar when I saw I could get the ebook through my library. So there we are. 
 The book is, in no small part, a mystery, so I won't say too much about the plot. One of our central characters, Ye Wenjie, we follow from her childhood when she sees her father beaten to death during one of the Chinese Cultural Revolution's show trials, killed for teaching and practicing Western "reactionary" science, in particular Einstein. She herself ends up on the wrong side of the government, but her scientific abilities get her assigned to a secretive installation high on a mountain, working with radio waves. 
 Decades later, our central character becomes Wang Miao, a scientist working on nanotech, who is drawn into trying to unravel the mysterious deaths of prominent scientists around the world, which is tied somehow to a virtual reality game in which physics seems to work differently than in our own world: where the predictability of Earth's days and years and weather patterns are replaced with a sun that may or may not rise, that may suddenly leave the world in freezing death or in heat that literally scorches the planet's surface. The point of the game seems to be to figure out the rules under which the world operates, but in reality there is much more to it. 
 It feels like a spoiler, but pretty much every review I've seen mentions it pretty casually, so I'll add that one of the central concerns of the novel is first contact with an alien species, and this was one of the most interesting aspects to me: how do humans respond to finding out that they are not alone in the universe. How, for that matter, do the aliens? 
 This is the sort of hard sci fi where the focus is on the science and the issues raised by it, not on the characters and their interactions. It's not quite Arthur C. Clarke bad in this regard, but there's a certain flatness here, for sure. Still, I found it an enjoyable read as we dig into the puzzles and mysteries.