This really was an incredible book that I enjoyed thoroughly right from the start all the way up to the end leaving me immediately wanting to start the next part of the trilogy.
If it weren't for the little things that bothered me, this would be a five star book easily. I love the science-fiction of it the most and primarily that is what this story is. Concept and plot very much comes first far above character development or personality. This is a story of mankind at war with itself (in a way very much grounded in reality) such that it leads to the first contact with alien life beautifully strange and scarily hostile and these are what take the main focus. However it is very clearly the first act of a larger story and so on its own it doesn't feel complete at all. The structure of this book feels like it fails to follow any kind of structure in itself as it is only a piece of a larger story. As if one book as been cut into three and I have only read a third of a book yet it is packaged as a whole. Because of this, it never feels like it really goes anywhere. Sure, a lot happens and the story spans multiple decades (or thousands of years) but that feels simply circumstantial. While these things that happen are very interesting, they are just things happening as opposed to a story. This works in the book's favour on some level as it leaves the reader eager for the second book the same way the first chapter to any single book should leave the reader ready for the rest of itself.
My second criticism is that the characters are merely vessels for the plot to happen around. This a perfectly valid way to tell a story but it does make it harder to be invested at all with any kind of emotion other than interest in the sci-fi ideas. I don't care about the characters at all especially the main character Wang Miao who seems personalityless and barely contributes anything at all other than to be consistently present such that we have one character we can follow. This is especially noticealbe in the Three Body game chapters in which I regularly forgot he was even present as he was just an excuse to have these chapters in the book and did almost nothing in this supposed 'game' other than to ask a few questions and watch events unfold. Watching the plot happen around him is what he does and this is fine except that I have no character to invest in. On the other hand, there is Ye Wenjie, the other perspective character, for the chapters set during the cultural revolution who again feels mostly there for things to happen to but she at least has some agency in the narrative as she is what begins the entire purpose of the story through her own actions due to decisions entirely understandable due to her past. She may not have personality but she has good motivations. 
These sections of the book following Ye Wenjie's side of the story were more interesting to me and that is why I found the chapter structure of switching back and forth between the two to be rather jarring. Vast stretches of the book felt like they would forget about the other side as we go a little too many chapters in a row without checking in on them. While I enjoyed both sides of the story, I kept growing concerned that we would never return to the other. This is simply a layout preference and, again, only a minor criticism but I couldn't not mention it.
Overall, I did really enjoy this book and I look forward to starting the rest of it. Some of the concepts involved were fascinating to imagine and really think about how they work. A wonderful exploration of sci-fi and challeges faced by small creatures in a huge impossibly complex universe unhindered by characters.