This book is astonishingly bad -- especially coming from a recent Hugo Award winner whose Three-Body Problem trilogy was fantastic. Although I recently learned this book was originally written years before the Three-Body books, so that may be part of it. It's not just that the plot is unlikely, that's true of all speculative fiction. It's that the kids don't act like kids and especially don't talk like kids. What 13 year old boy would ever say, "I’m not used to the tone you use, like a teacher addressing a student, but I do appreciate the sense of what you’ve said." Perhaps its a translation issue, but he used the same translator for one of the Three Body books and it came out fine. Here, the action and dialogue are so far-fetched and unrealistic as to prevent you from getting into the plot. It's too distracting to be enjoyable, you simply can't suspend disbelief when the execution is so flawed.