From a personal recommendation elsewhere:
Pros:
- the premise is good
- many of the plot twists are good or brilliant
- many problems described are obvious in hindsight, but something you would never think about
Cons:
- Writing is uneven. Some parts you sail through, some parts make you physically cringe
- Many (too many) parts are "here's a scientific theory I learned about, let me give you a brief Wikipedia-style description. (Contrast with Blindsight where explanation of theories used is done in the appendix to the book, and is an interesting read on its own)
- No person in the history of this world has ever spoken like characters in the book. Dialogs are just people explaining things to each other
- Some things are introduced "just because". Otherwise the crises in the book couldn't be solved (e.g. it's assumed that the book talks about now and suddenly there are advanced nanomaterials and working hibernation)
All in all:
It's a very solid "hard" science fiction book which could be absolutely brilliant. But it's greatness is greatly reduced by the language and structure.
So? Doesn't sound that different from 90% of classic sci-fi, especially Asimov.
>- No person in the history of this world has ever spoken like characters in the book. Dialogs are just people explaining things to each other
Ditto.
That doesn’t make it good writing.
Sci-fi was never about the writing, in the way hi-brow literature was.
Heck, it started from pulp magazines aimed at teenagers.
I'd heard the sequel was not so good—anyone have an opinion?
Liu escalates the arms race between races in the last third of the book so far that i was genuinely shocked and mildly unnerved at the implications of it. The trilogy really should have been called "The Dark Forest" because that is precisely what is described therein.
You can't transmit information faster than light using quantum entanglement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Quantum_mech...
Like, I'd be more happy with wormholes or tachyons or "actually the universe is a simulation" as possible fictional sources of superluminal communication than entanglement, just because we really do know how entanglement behaves quite well by now and it's no good for FTL communication.
Maybe gravity doesn't exist on the sun. Maybe electrons attract in the Sahara desert. This is what you're suggesting.
Authors are making a common mistake, and you're justifying it. The point of science fiction (at least hard scifi[0][1]) is to predict the future given some assumptions or premise like "we can control individual neurons"[2] or "there's life on a neutron star"[3] or "the moon exploded"[4] or "message from outer space"[5]. You get some outlandish sounding ideas that readers can consider seriously because the author genuinely thought them through. Ideas that don't respect relativity are useless. It's like writing fiction about Napoleon with walkie-talkies. It doesn't make sense, you could (probably) do much better than Napoleonic tactics with a walkie-talkie. A military tactic in space that relies on instant communication is a useless idea. Plus I just plain think it would've made a better story if they had to strategize around the speed of light.
(spoiler) to be fair, The Three Body Problem almost did it right, their ships travel at non-relativistic speeds, and the first 3 messages take 5 years to transmit. But I didn't bother reading past the first book after the quantum entanglement mistake on the last few pages.
Maybe I'm getting elitist. The hard/soft scifi thing is an old conversation. I understand that the social commentary is a big aspect of some books, just don't call them science fiction.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15462327
[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=three+body+problem+"hard+scie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Space_and_Time_in_Specia...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8937197
not exactly. SR is true only in the fixed Euclidean metric space. It is applicable to our Universe only as far as our Universe can be approximated by such a metric space. Which is really a very good approximation - almost like a "fact" - at relatively small (yet not extremely small) scales and at small mass/energy densities.
>There's no debate, it's a certainty that you cannot transmit information faster than light.
in the domain of applicability of SR. Ie. until, say, you do something severe to that metric space. Which author actually did, in some way, by folding/unfolding additional dimensions.
>Plus I just plain think it would've made a better story if they had to strategize around the speed of light.
reminded how USSR armed forces seriously strategized around cavalry attacks on the Eve of WWII, ie. the war which opened for USSR by lightning speed attack by German tanks and airforce.
The math behind GR and QM contradict each other. We have a large amount of empirical evidence for a speed limit for information travel, yes, but since we don't even know how the universe works (ie a mathematically consistent model, with few parameters, supported by experimental evidence), I don't think you can say "it's how the universe works". We might eventually find out that the information speed limit only holds at low energy scales for example.