This is a failure of the reader, not the literature. It's science fiction space opera written from the cultural perspective completely alien to most western sci-fi literature. It's absolutely nothing like H.G. Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge, Herbert, Heinlein, or Niven. The Three Body Problem is almost the antithesis of all of those manifest destiny individual heroes. All of those authors have much more alike amongst themselves than they do with the narrative history we read through The Three Body Problem. Of course a lot of western readers don't like it, it wasn't written for their perspective. I don't even think I could really get into it enough to REALLY enjoy it as much as my "comfort food" sci-fi. But, I could tell their was something there, and it was my own limitation of understanding, not a failure of the literature or the translation.