The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

This is the sprawling, complex first volume of a trilogy about a most unusual first contact. Set in China (the author's home), starting during the Cultural Revolution and continuing until today or possibly the near future, it tracks several different people with complex relationships. A woman working at radio transmission/monitoring station dedicated to tracking and possibly attacking satellites in orbit discovers, almost by accident, a way to harness the energy of the sun to send out a brief transmission detected by aliens from Alpha Centauri. This is a binary star system, with another fainter star that is believed to be part of the system as well - hence the three-body problem of the title. Orbital mechanics can completely solve the movements of two bodies, but except for a few special cases there is no general solution for predicting the movements of three of them. This means that these aliens live in a very hostile and trying environment. Still, they manage to (a) receive the message (which somehow is more powerful than the whole sun, despite being broadcast spherically), (b) decode it almost instantly (because it uses a "self-decrypting" format, whatever that is), and (c) respond in colloquial Chinese (in the same self-decrypting format). And this isn't even the least believable part of the story. Part of the problem is that I started out thinking of this as science fiction - if I had it in my "magic realism" category, perhaps it would have fit better. I just kept bumping up against science things and going, "um, no." So it didn't work for me, and I won't be reading the rest of the trilogy.