memes

It's not a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin isn't important to the story, it's just there to serve as motivation for the characters. In the Three Body Problem, the mystery of what happened to science is central to the plot of the entire book.

This isn't "pretending to punch Lois Lane". This is "why the hell did Superman just kill Lois Lane!?" The whole plot of the story is that science stops working. Scientists are killing themselves because of it. One of the characters is seeing a countdown when he closes his eyes. Aside from the Three-Body-Problem game parts, the whole rest of the book is structured as a mystery that they're trying to solve. This mystery is the primary motivation for the characters in the book, and it's presented as a mystery for the reader to speculate about.

Basically, the book is structured as if it were a murder on a train, and the whole structure of the story suggests that someone on the train is the murderer. But, it turns out that the murderer is Zeus, who descended from the heavens, killed the murder victim for his own reasons, and left. Ta-da, mystery solved! (And there's the additional bullshit that scientists are committing suicide because their experiments are failing. That's just so ridiculous. Actual scientists would be so excited by unexpected results. The way to upset a scientist wouldn't be to have something appear to break the laws of physics. What would upset real scientists would be a replication crisis: either they can't match someone else's work, or people call into question their work because nobody can match the results they're getting.)

And those are just the problems with the "A" plot. The "B" plot is the ultra-stupid simulation of life on a planet in a 3-body system. You know what life would be like in that kind of system: nonexistent. But no, you're supposed to believe in people being flattened and rehydrated. I mean, come ON. And you're also supposed to believe that people are playing this "game" and loving it. Has the author ever actually played a game? Has the author ever met any people?

The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the science is bad. It's just a bad book. It's a book that dumb people read and they think the author is smart, and if the author is smart the book must be good, it just went above their heads. But, the author isn't smart, the book isn't smart, the book isn't good.