Bringing Chinese Science Fiction to the West

Currently reading Three Body Problem and agree on all points.

Is there a TL;DR version?

read it a year ago. now reading "dark forest" - sequel to 3-body. I agree, both are excellent books, but now "dramatically" different from western scifi

If you enjoy allegorical, non-Western sci-fi, I would highly recommend the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, two prolific brothers who collaborated on a wide range of largely science-fictional material during Soviet times. Most of their work was heavily censored for allegorical references to the contemporary Soviet society and ideology; unredacted English translations have been published over the past fifteen years or so with epilogues written by Boris covering the censorship process. I would recommend beginning with "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn," which I started with, although "Hard to be a God" and "Monday Begins on Saturday" are more strongly allegorical. I read their entire catalogue after reading a book review last year and becoming (mildly) obsessed.

I just finished Death's End (the third book). The whole series is a fun ride.

> The description of sci-fi books, not as predictions about the future, but as allegories for the present, is dead on.

I just finished reading Three Body Problem today. Curiously, in the afterword for American readers, the author explicitly states that he doesn't write sci-fi to discuss present-day problems in disguise.

>"Show-not-tell" isn't much followed.

man, while that approach has it merits, i sometimes bored to death and drowning in American ("Show-not-tell" is taught here a lot starting from beginning of K12 and it is taught like it it the _only_ way) novels'/stories' showing and showing and showing all these details with telling almost nothing. Even Stephenson's works - i can't get more than a few tens of the pages in one sitting even though i do like his work. Again, it isn't about _all_ American writing, mostly about modern :) I mean just look at Asimov's Foundation - 100% tell, no show. Well, may be it is a bit dry for that reason, 5% of show wouldn't hurt :) Yet it is an example that "Show-not-tell" is just a tool which has its limited domain and which should not be enforced like orthodoxy (as far as i see, be it arts, science, etc. - wherever/whenever orthodoxy appears the art or science disappears there)

Btw, i'm a Russian (and do love a lot of American writing, especially SF and for the reasons mentioned above mostly buy American modern short SF where tell/show ratio is usually higher because of the short form limitation i guess :)

You can also argue that if the theme is about something as expansive as the "dark forest" (no plot spoiler!), flat characters and telling-not-showing are not bad choices for writing style. The humankind can be as insignificant or dull for this context.

Book 3 is where it all comes together. Pretty insane!

I read the English translation and felt the writing ranged from adequate to tedious, and conveyed little beyond the literal meaning of the words. Certainly some was due to skill composing English, which I assume is due to the translator. But at times there were long, dull tangents, especially (IIRC) into personal histories of characters, that had no impact on the story. I started skipping paragraphs and pages, and it took an effort to reach the end. The Cultural Revolution scenes at the beginning, however, were powerful and left a deep impression.

After that, I picked up a book by Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize winning author from South Africa. What a relief and pleasure - both books used the same language but entirely differently, hers was crafted so beautifully and with so much more meaning in the same number of characters.

Tom Stoppard (whose embrace of serious science should make him HN's favorite playwright - for example, one famous play turns on the Second Law of Thermodynamics), describes the difference between the highly skilled and everyday writer in his play, The Real Thing:

HENRY [holding a cricket bat]: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel... (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this [hack script] and see how you get on. ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?’ ‘Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits ... ‘Ouch!’

I found it hard to get into, as well. I had this feeling of distance, like I was reading a parable that I'm unable to understand. Or like the writing style was too unfamiliar an jarring, yet perhaps entirely acceptable with acclimatization. I'm not sure I can say it wasn't a good book on these grounds, I've had similar issues with older literature from western cultures as well.

I'm told from a Chinese source that while the concepts of The Three Body Problem are good, the writing style is considered terrible even in Chinese.

I saw a level of immaturity of thought.

I stereotyped that to China being behind still scientifically. They don't yet culturally have a scientific mind.

But it was an OK read I thought.

Your point 0 is one of the reasons I struggle with reading foreign (currently - Russian) SF [0]. I feel like the original author's intent isn't coming through. I still enjoy "non-western" SF for the perspective it brings.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Tales-Century-Russian/dp/188...

> [1] I've found, totally anecdotally, that a few of my Christian friends who have spent a good chunk of their reading time reading translations are able to enjoy translated works better than those who have not.

I don't mean to be overly PC or anything, but the word 'Christian' seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the sentence. Is it just a true characterisation that has no effect on their enjoyment, or do Christians somehow have more (or less) difficulty with translated works than non-Christians? (Or was it maybe a typo?)

I know that it was one of my great delights in reading Borges when I realised that I trusted Andrew Hurley, and could feel confident reading anything that he had translated. (I've never read the original Spanish, so the best that I can say is that, if Hurley isn't faithfully representing the original, then at least I enjoy his representation.) Do you know any 'reliable', in this sense, translators of Chinese science fiction?

I want to offer a differing opinion. I found the writing terrible which is excused on account of being a translation. The alien parts are quite imaginative but the rest of the action was just too surreal to stomach. The characters are cartoonishly flat or maybe China is more alien to me than I can handle.

I found it awful. It took too long to get anywhere, and nothing happened when it did - most of the pages are spent on characters, but the characters aren't interesting. I don't get what people see in it.

You need uBlock Origin & uMatrix.

I think you mean antagonists? And yes, but the few ones I've read are pretty heavy-handed and it's pretty terribly done.

I think it's cultural, not a matter of translation. Readers in the west will have less access to stereotypes and tropes that all authors rely on, to some extent.