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Comment by Hates_ | Hacker News Reader

I can't recommend The Third-Body problem enough. Definitely worth reading.

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.

Although three-body trilogy is one of my most favourite sci-fi books, I think your criticism is valid. Even the Chinese version is kind of so-so in terms of character building.

That's not why this book is great though, it's a hard sci-fi, and its charm is in blending imagination with science in a way that seems very plausible. It blew my mind when I realize some parts of the story which I initially assumed to be imagination turned out to have been scientifically or at least theoretically proven.

Do you mind to elaborate which pays you though were imagination but were proverb? Are you referring to the sun amplification and the way sophons are made? Those are the parts I assume(d) to be BS. The sophon thing seemed so bullshitty that it required some effort on my part to not be pulled out of the story too much by it.

Loved the first book. I couldn't finish the second book. It had a different translator but maybe that was why it was hard to be interested in.

Also, it felt like a Russian novel in that we had to learn about what happened to your grandparents, their treatment during the counter revolution to understand what was happening to people in today's world. I found that not very persuasive in terms of character. Is that really the way people in China see the world? As an american, I do think I'm optimistic and don't want to think about how history affects people. But it does a good bit. But my forefathers were not tortured and brutalized in the same way the people in the story faced. My grandfather was in WW2, but since he came back and went to college, that made it easier for my father and me and hopefully for my son.

Maybe if I was African American, I might see things differently. They certainly suffered from brutal treatment making it harder for later generations to succeed.

But the novel itself, I wanted more character. Once I got the 3 body problem idea, I wanted to find out what happened in the second novel, but it was hard to be interested.

Being European with a grandfather who was one of the few German survivors in Stalingrad, having grown up with a view of my grandparents home that had a wall that looked different than the others because it had been hit by a bomb I have a hard time relating to your argument.

I do agree though that the characters and writing in general could have been stronger. That's unfortunately the trade off with hard sci-fi though. Have you read much other hard sci-fi?

You typically have to read hard sci-fi for the ideas because the writhing trends to be mediocre at best. Try reading the average story in Analog and you will see what I'm talking about

I keep seeing Three Body being called "hard sci-fi", and I can't understand why.

In my vocabulary, that term means scientifically plausible or at the very least not manifestly impossible. But core elements of Three Body are just that: impossible. Even without going into the bizarre dimensional unfolding of protons (which are not even fundamental particles) to nice 2D membranes on which circuits are etched using meson beams (...), the resulting sophons are then used to communicate instantaneously over interstellar distances, courtesy of quantum entanglement. And no, that's not how quantum entanglement works; you can't use it to transfer information at superluminal speeds.

The "science" in Three Body is at the level of Star Trek technobabble. It might sound sciency to laymen, but it is really just magic with a modern coat of paint.

It's difficult to write galaxy spanning fiction without some form of FTL communication. Even Isaac Asimov uses "ultrawave relays" in Foundation.

If Foundation isn't hard sci-fi anymore, what's left? Only books like The Martian that don't leave our solar system?

The Foundation also had psychic powers, pocket-sized nuclear reactors, and people accurately predicting political events occurring hundreds of years in the future. Just because Clarke wrote it doesn't mean it's hard SF.

Does hard sci-fi change over time though? I'm not sure but I would imagine that pocket-sized nuclear reactors for instance were at one time plausible, if the story was written when that was a case is it hard sci-fi? Or does it cease to be hard sci-fi as our understanding of the universe changes?

Asimov wrote Foundation.

To tell the truth, I don't personally consider any SF Asimov wrote to be particularly "hard".

Whoops.

You can handwave some sort of FTL communication based on undiscovered physics if you want, but if you do that you need to avoid trying to explain it in a way that violates current scientific understanding. For example, you can't just declare that it works because of quantum entanglement.

Hypothetically, would you extend this to say that if current scientific understanding changes then a book could transition out of "hard science fiction"? I'd have to say it's more about intent than reality. I've heard of Brandon Sanderson's novels described as "hard magic fantasy", because even though the magic is made up it's largely consistent with the established world.

I think it's reasonable to say whether it's "hard" as determined at the point of publication. If you're reading old hard sci-fi, it may include things that were consistent with the scientific understanding at the time it was written but which were subsequently found to be incorrect.

Alastair Reynolds does it.

There are levels of hardness. The mark of hard SF is a small number of breaks from reality, used effectively. If you use a different break from reality every time, you might as well be writing fantasy.

It's been a long time since I read Foundation, but I'm pretty sure Asimov was too smart to explain how those "ultrawave relays" worked. As a reader I am therefore free to assume that they are based on future physics discoveries (maybe involving wormholes?). That's fine as long as there is no obvious contradiction of known physics.

The really hard way though is to do what Robert Forward did in "Flight of the Dragonfly [1]: it includes 30+ pages and 12 figures with technical details. He worked it all out at the level of a real mission proposal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld

FTL is a big problem for hard sci fi. What we know about the physical world is amazing and beautiful, and it's hard to see novels butcher it by adding in FTL. On the other hand, without FTL the theme of every novel becomes "I travelled to another star and now everyone I know is dead", or the light-speed limit otherwise ends up dominating the plot and squeezing out everything else.

I agree with the assessment of the Three-Body Problem.

I was excited about the premise and I enjoyed some of the SF concepts, but really the "back-story" was IMO the interesting piece, whereas the present time "action" was quite bland. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend, but I agree the criticism is fair.

I've been assuming that a large portion of the people giving it such high marks read it in the original Chinese. The motivations of some of the characters also seems stilted, but that's the kind of thing I would breeze over if I was sufficiently "in to it".

Glad I'm not the only one...

thank you, i couldn't agree more. The entire first book was boring. People playing a contrived video game! which sounds boring! but they are strangely fascinated!

The very first chapter, introducing the characters during the cultural revolution, was good but the rest ... not so good.

(retreats to Iain M Banks & Gene Wolfe)

Flat characters, unfortunately, are a regular feature of Chinese fiction, and not just sci-fi (though worse in sci-fi). In fact, most of the complaints about Three Body on this page (weird story structuring, awkward language, huge plot twists in the space of one or two sentences) are broadly applicable to contemporary Chinese fiction in general.

If anyone's interested in more Chinese sci-fi, Clarkesworld has been mentioned. I also produce a literary journal of Chinese fiction in translation, called Pathlight, and we did one issue based on sci-fi, with I think some really excellent stories in it. I wonder if posting a link to what is essentially my own product is frowned upon here... Well, hell with it. Here's the ebook if anyone's interested:

https://www.amazon.com/Pathlight-Spring-2013-Alice-Xin-ebook...

I think people are usually cool with it if there's full disclosure up front. Nobody wants to feel manipulated, but most folks on HN appreciate a timely plug when they see one.

If that is true, then why are people reading Chinese fiction? What do they do better than the western alternatives?

Talking about the Three Body Series specifically, the sheer scope and the lucidity of the writing was pretty breathtaking. Cixin Liu is like a Chinese Arthur C. Clarke, his novels are just overflowing with ideas. Haven't read anything like it since Clarke or Asimov in Western Science Fiction, with the exception of Ted Chiang.

Hmm, comparing Liu to Clarke is fair, but I don't think it's so hard to find more recent western SF bristling with ideas, Iain Banks, for example. Liu does have a very different feel (the 'different perspective') other commenters have mentioned, which certainly makes it worth a read, in spite of the flatness of characters etc. Some of it may be down to the translator, I found Dark Forest to be much more fun, though some of that is developments in the plot, not just Ken Liu's translation, I'm sure.

I haven't read Banks in a long time admittedly, but as you point out there's just something different about Liu's voice that I don't think I've read for a long time. Take for example things like this

>"One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean".

There's some kind of "humanness" and scale to his writing that's really great. I think his characters are necessarily flat because his characters pretty much always are humanity looking outward, there's really no place for lots of individual development.

Flat characters are also a regular feature of sci-fi, so Chinese sci-fi may be getting the a double dose of flat...

For example, read most things by Asimov or Herbert. Although I enjoy good characterization, lots of sci-fi works fine without it.

agreed. i found liu cixin very reminiscent of arthur c clarke, both the good parts and the bad.

I think best Sci-Fi books are like unicorn startups: exceptionally good at one aspect while chaotic in the others parts.

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.

i agree. It was a pretty bad book

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