Writer Liu Cixin on How His Visions of the Future Collide with Reality
wsj.com
wsj.com
- Nothin' But Plot Holes
- Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
- the Four Body Problem (since the trilsolarans don't actually live in a 3-body system
I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's so hackneyed and tropey. People call it hard sf, but it's the opposite.
You can also never go wrong with Arthur C. Clarke. Another favourite of mine, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
If you are reading this, Greg: I want to have your book!
Stephen Baxter does a great job with hard sf, and much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work fits the bill.
Edit:
Oops I guess I did say that people who liked it hadn't read real SF. What I meant by that was that they were an exposed to a lot of the genre, because the "original" ideas in TBP I keep hearing people praise felt very familiar and tropey to me.
"The central narrative is that of humanity rising and evolving to become the second most powerful race in the universe, next to the god-like Xeelee. Character development tends to be secondary to the depiction of advanced theories and ideas, such as the true nature of the Great Attractor, naked singularities and the great battle between baryonic and dark matter lifeforms."
Is this what you think is harder sci-fi than TBP, with better character development?
Be prepared for a wild ride.
What happens when a ship is sliced in half by an almost infinitely strong piece of string? What if people were able to enter and move around in 4-dimensional space, or if 3D space suddenly collapsed to 2D? What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?
Just like harry potter explores what happens if you have a cloak of deception or time turner. What would happen if Dementors invaded Hogwarts? Forgive me, I haven't actually read the whole series.
I've never heard a definition of hard SF that didn't require some effort to make the science part sound plausible. It's one thing to not hold up to the scrutiny of experts, but there were a number of times I looked up from TBP and thought "that sounds wrong".
If TBP is hard scifi than so is How To Train Your Dragon.
TBP and the rest of the trilogy aren't hard in terms of fully valid science, or even in terms of Atomic Rocket's[0] rule of "one scientifically implausible item per story". But they aren't soft either, not like (say) Star Trek. It's something in between.
--
[0] - http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval....
just take the posterboy of American hard SF, Arthur C. Clarke. (whose writing resembles Liu Cixin a lot). A lot of his stuff is straight up fantastical or cosmic. Childhood's end for example (sort of TBP like) or The City and the Stars. The science in either one isn't really plausible. Hard science fiction was always distinguished by ditching characters and traditional adventure or hero narratives for ideas. It was never about writing a physics PhD thesis.
But then you don't get any aliens or speculative technology that way. Which most future science fiction is interested in. That or robots and galactic colonization. Dune and Foundation are just as fantastical in their own way as a Remembrance of Earth's Past. And yet, they're classics and cornerstones of modern science fiction.
I've not read the books, but I have read the synopsis, and when I read this bit I was somewhat surprised as there are so many things that break that new limit - would our electrical minds work at that speed? What would happen to electron orbitals? What happens to the stars orbiting the galaxy at ~200km/s ?
Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.
I thought the characters in the first were well written. I lost track of who was who in the later ones.
Isn't that part of the charm of the book, though?
The characters are not as strong individually as they could be, but that fits the society they find themselves in.
> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before.
It's your opinion against thousands who read and like SF and loved Liu Cixin's books. It's true that there you must accept a set of axioms that create a suspension of disbelief in most of those books.
I thought what portion of the book I could stomach, sucked. Other people liked it. Both are fine.
High-concept is not the same as hard SF, it means that the novel is driven by the ideas it's trying to articulate rather than anything else. Hence the fragile plot and characters.
But the central question - is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? Are your views of reality being systematically manipulated to prevent you reaching certain conclusions and elevating yourself? Those are more interesting, especially coming from a writer under the CCP.
This was what was most interesting to me while reading the trilogy. The thought experiment of the 2-D society living on a paper target that is trying to predict where bullets will appear in their universe still sticks with me. I'd love to read anything else that explores the idea of the limits of science
I liked Terra Ignota in that regard.
I didn't get through the first two chapters of the TBP, but I loved all TI books.
(The excerpts, general praise, and "dark forest theory" did not do it for me.)
I also never really understood what the motivation was for projecting a countdown timer into that guy's optic nerve, other than a hackneyed Dan-Brown-level suspense device.
I wish I'd read this on paperback instead of e-book so I could flip back to some more of the "wait. what?"s and "?!"s I would have scribbled in the margins.
I actually liked that concept, and I think if participle experiments unexpectedly stopped working a lot of scientists would lose heart.
But (SPOILERS), I couldn't get over the mechanism they used. They program two protons to effectively do their bidding flying around the world causing havoc. They communicate with the protons instantly and the protons can move around on their own, hear and see everything, effect people's vision, effect equipment. Honestly it wasn't really clear where the capabilities ended. It seemed so plot-convenience-y that it ruined the first half of the book for me. Which, despite people's criticisms here, I did like.
Actual physicist here. We LIVE for that moment when the experiment does something unexpected. That’s when new discoveries are made, and our understanding of the world turned upside down. We got into the field hoping for a moment like that to happen within our lifetime. Suicide? Hell no, we’d be giddy for excitement wanting to see what happens next.
Liu Cixin doesn’t have the faintest clue about scientists and what motivates them. I put down the book as soon as that part happened.
But iirc it started off with a whole history of physics grad students offing themselves when their experiments didn’t work out or confirmed negative results, not just the one you are referring to.
Though that still happens occasionally in some contexts like business, it’s not realistic for scientists, as you explain. But maybe Liu was taking some artistic and cultural license here, using something that at least has some precedent.
On the other hand, this would still destroy a lot of experimentation in the field of particle physics... although I guess it would be interesting to poke at the edges of the effect?
It's that simple. If there's no reproduction, there's no progress in any activity.
Perhaps you meant to conclude, ‘that’s not how I’d personally behave, or at least believe I would without having experienced such a trauma’?
Pity you tossed the book away just for that though.
But they were not the main objective of the Trisolarians’ intervention. The main objective was to sabotage particle accelerators and thus prevent humanity from understanding the full subatomic structure of matter, which is the key to scientific and technological advancement. Thus humanity would not be able to defend itself when the Trisolarian fleet arrived to colonize Earth 400yrs later.
Also, humanity just deciding one day that exploration is lame and unfair so they'll forever be against letting people leave the solar system was beyond annoying. And that forever is forever, humanity as a whole never changes their mind, even when they're being murdered by the dumbest smart weapon of all time.
This is one aspect I liked of the books because it is an exploration into the difficulty of big decision-making, and how various human biases can result in poor decisions.
Numerous critical decisions were wrong throughout the series, - the battle plan of the first engagement vs the Trisolaris probe, choice of Luo Ji’s successor, banning light speed research, strategy for defending against a Dark Forest attack, etc.
This may partly derive from the world view of a Chinese author who is old enough to know about all of the CCP’s big decisions and failures over the years - Great Leap Forward (famine), Cultural Revolution (destroyed knowledge, science, and truth), Tiananmen Square, etc.
Another compelling aspect was that it faced humanity with an adversary that was not only technologically superior, but also superior at decision-making and strategy. Every decision the Trisolarans made was clearly calculated, and all possible outcomes clearly understood by them. They were only thwarted in the end by random dumb luck (the human broadcast ships and Trisolaris escort probes flying through a region of space that disabled the probes).
I found it all culturally and psychologically insightful.
Then I remembered Chinese history.
If you make up arbitrary input conditions you can make justify anything. The Dark Forest theory is a prime example of it. Step 1 is "assume growth without bound", like you're on one of those finance shows trying to hock the hottest new startup stock by only talking about the YoY growth percentage. Everything after that is garbage, yet it is treated like gospel.
Kind of like how sea trade and settlement was banned in China after Zhenghe's travels? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin)
A big reason for liking the book for me was just a different perspective on politics and human psychology. Not saying it was always believable, but it was certainly something fresh and new to a westerner.
Just a note on this - "Trisolaris" is that species' name for themselves and their star system in the books, but the actual location is Alpha Centuari, which is the closest star system to Earth, just 4 light years (400yrs at .01c).
The Trisolarans actually did exactly what you say, used the Sophons to find nearby habitable planets. It's just that the nearest one was already inhabited, so they chose to invade and colonize it instead of finding another further away.
Not terribly implausible, especially since the 400yr journey to Earth was already high-risk to the survival of their species, and a longer journey to a further planet would be even moreso.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/alpha-cent...
You either need to re-read the book or stop commenting on it, because you are severely misremembering it.
you are combining to different things here. One aspect is that they use the sophons to stimy research into particle physics so that humans can't advance into understanding higher dimensionality, etc.
The second, unrelated aspect is using the sophons to effectively terrorize scientists in non particle physics fields into either submission or suicide by gaslighting them about the nature of the universe. The purpose of the countdown timer and blinking the universal background radiation from the main character's perspective was to make his life a living nightmare until he agreed to stop his nanoparticle research.
Agreed, scientists would never react that way in real life. Some of the replies are saying that the behavior is explained by Chinese attitudes towards failure, but this plot device (person commits suicide in response to philosophically disturbing event) is something that I've seen a few times in different contexts, so it must be more general than that.
When I was in high school, I wrote a story that was basically just this. Character sees something impossible, spirals into depression over it, and finally kills himself. I wouldn't enjoy reading a story like that today, but I remember that it matched the aesthetics taught in K-12 English classes, which weren't very concerned with characters behaving realistically.
The story "What's Expected of Us" by Ted Chiang uses this trope too. It annoyed me enough when I read it that I wrote a note about it:
> There is zero chance people would go insane due to the emergence of a philosophical paradox like this. The laws of physics are full of mind-bending paradoxes in the real world, but they have no effect on the average person's state of mind. They are not relevant to our day-to-day pursuit of money, popularity, food, entertainment, friendship, sex, etc. ... I don't know why people have a tendency to write stories about a philosophical idea leading to insanity, when such a thing clearly doesn't match reality. I fell prey to the same temptation with my [story I wrote in high school], but that was more believable since in my story only the protagonist was driven insane by the phenomenon, not the whole society.
The idea being that perhaps a sufficiently advanced alien entity could change the laws of physics in our corner of the universe, thus putting a sort physical speed limit on us and preventing us from probing outside of our own region of space.
I mean, in fairness, this is basically traditional in sci-fi; characterisation that wasn't terrible was a bit of a novelty until quite recently.
The entire book feels like a cobbling of Cixin's fanciful "what if?", vaguely scifi moments (like the oft-cited wire cutting ship) hastily glued together with the most unrelatable and frankly forgettable characters I've ever read.
Go grab some Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, or Philip Dick.
- As you say, the plot is terrible. Kerouac had a more coherent narrative. What story there was strained believability even for pulp sci fi.
- The characters are utterly devoid of humanity. I don't even know who's who half the time, and there is no continuity throughout the series.
- There are no clever "ah ha" moments where the author has thought of something "profound" in relation to the scenario they've crafted. It's tropes and painful lurches from one thing to another.
I don't get it. I finished it and I couldn't believe all the people telling me how great it was.
I liked the books so I guess my vast collection of classical and modern SF is not real scotsman.
Also, I don't think anything could be less flat than Liu's Chinese characters—especially the women like Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin. I suppose you might not have spent a lot of time with Chinese people, but you should know that due to their culture they live somewhat different emotional lives than Westerners, with much less emphasis placed on direct individual expression and much more focus on private or hidden (from family, society, etc.) actions.
Personally, I come to science fiction because I'm interested in seeing how human beings respond to the extreme situations in which imagined futures place them. In that regard, Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the most engaging and successful scifi series I have ever read.
I can however recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan. Or Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. "Human" beings in "extreme situations", indeed.
What do you consider real SF?
Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci.
Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.
That's a really good insight, and I largely agree. I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future.
> "...but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP."
I strongly disagree. The alien powers were so unlikely and all-powerful that they may well have been called instead "Witch Demons from The Horror Dimension!"
Check out Blindsight and Echopraxia for where the author extrapolated a bunch of physics and neuroscience research into a vision of an interesting, and quite disturbing future. Well, there were also (in-universe explained, and quite ingeniously at that) vampires, so this part would make it soft sci-fi, but the story/universe would work without them too.
I consider Greg Egan and Ian M. Banks as hard sci-fi authors, even though their work is wildly creative. If you haven't read their work, I highly recommend it.
(Possible spoilers?)
The culture is so extremely powerful that they’re scarcely less magical than the dimension-bending aliens in TBP, which I agree are pretty fantastical, though I’m happy to accept them in exchange for a vastly ambitious plot.
Banks is alright, certainly creative, but I wouldn’t call his work hard sci-fi. Player of Games maybe more so than the others I read, if you ignore the Mind Ships. My issue with his books is that I feel the plots tend to meander and he seems a bit over enthusiastic with the gore.
Can I ask what you like about Egan’s work? I’m not familiar.
You know what? You're right. I'm not even going to defend it. In writing a response, I came across this section on The Culture Wikipedia page, and: Yes, not hard sci-fi. More like Star Trek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Science_and_techno...
> Can I ask what you like about Egan’s work? I’m not familiar.
Read this description of Diaspora: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html
If that sounds intriguing, you might like his work. He starts with a what-if physics theory informed by his mathematics background. It's heady, positing the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere embedded in a 12-dimensional torus, which allows wormholes to exist and for the protagonists to move through them. From that he extrapolates about what that would mean.
So, maybe not hard sci-fi. Is there such a thing as "math" sci-fi?
There's a scene at the end of the novel. It's short, and not narratively important, so I'm ok with telling you, but it might be a spoiler. If you read the description above and you plan to read it, skip the next paragraph, but it's what really hooked me.
The protagonists discover an artifact that changes slightly as they move from universe to universe. They decide to 'follow' it across the universes, hoping to find the civilization that built it. Tens, hundreds, thousands, billions of universes pass by, and in so doing, they lose connection to their home: "more than seven million broken links, and over ninety billion years of identified [time] slippage". And so they decide to continue, because even if they find their way home again, their home (our, Earth) Universe would be unrecognizable, perhaps dying. At last, when analyzed, the artifact turns out to be (among other things) a massive sculpture "spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions". Collapsing it down to 5 dimensions, so they can get an approximation of what it looks like, "it was a four-legged, four-armed creature, with one arm stretched high above its head... reaching up. To the infinite number of levels above. To all the worlds it would never see, never touch, never understand." That precis does not do it justice, but. Just, astonishing.
You can add magic, but it should be grounded in some form of reality and be internally consistent. Hard SF is stuff that is theoretically possible but we just lack the tech for it, and especially how that might affect society. Cheap access to space is an easy example, thinking about a society with a working space elevator that enables people to live outside of traditional political systems. The similar story might be written about people stranded on an otherwise deserted island.
I believe the hardest sci-fi is called "non-fiction". There is a "scale" for this, anyway:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...
I'd say something like "For all mankind" also lands in the Sci-Fi genre, and there REALLY has been nothing physically impossible (yet), though the nuclear engine is borderline
It's hard to imagine "The Martian" or "For all mankind" to NOT be in the category of "science fiction"; they're certainly not fantasies. Maybe "For all mankind" belongs in "historical fiction" but it's edging towards being too recent for that. I don't think they're "just fiction" because grouping them in with, say "100 years of solitude" or "ulysses", or even "the client" doesn't seem quite right either.
The Martian supposes we send some human missions to Mars like we probably will in a decade or two, and lays out the steps a crewman takes to survive being left behind. There’s not really an idea there to explore other than what might be done in an engineering planning meeting.
I might call it eng-fi instead of sci-fi.
> That is, take a ... hypothetical and run with it, explore the consequences of the idea.
How is The Martian not:
- hypothetical: Astronaut gets stranded on Mars
- consequences: Steps to survive, survivor and rescue crew decisions and emotions.
The world isn't really any different for the hypothetical of Watney getting stranded on mars. It's just an event that happens. A hypothetical like -what if Mars were already inhabited by aliens or -what if we could launch items to space for less than $.10/kg using X technology would be more on the sci-fi side of hypotheticals to me. The latter because it would open up the question of how the world would develop differently, even though it's just a simple question of technology.
Edit: I should make it clear I loved The Martian, I'm just making the argument it could be called not sci-fi.
I don't really agree about the characters except for the ones of the third book. The third book feels a bit like a "history lesson through the eyes of this specific person".
I don't really value the "hardness" of SF though.
The Three Body Problem seems like a very weird book by the standards of the 21st century but it would feel right at home amongst the "golden age" 50s and 60s sci-fi novels. It is a real throwback to the Big Idea! stories of that era.
I wrote longer reviews of all three novels [0] (to save you the click, I thought the first one was great, the second was OK, and the third actively bad!)
[0] https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_prob...
I must strongly disagree on your position that only people with specific histories may enjoy a specific book.
I think I recognize science (MSc in physics), my fiction (enjoy everything from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Banks, Clarke) and found the books as damn entertaining read.
It's fiction! If I want "real science" I will do a refresher on my quantum mechanics, CS algos or peruse the latest Economist.
Silly stories have their place, and some of us enjoy an entertaining yarn (if a yarn is 'entertaining' is then again a matter of taste).
No, I hated the first one.
It effectively just means, "The science presented seemed plausible enough to me that it didn't distract or annoy me."
It's entirely personal since we all have different levels of fluency in science, and different levels of tolerance for the dissonance we feel when we read something we know is wrong.
I guess you like better smaller plots, the author can make more consistent and believable.
To me, the way Liu links one after another crazy physics stuff into the book story is masterful. I've read most SF classics and there's nothing like that. That in itself is an accolade.
Heck, several times I had to browse Wikipedia to see whether the next mad stuff had any scientific background, to find most had.
It could be because of a cultural mismatch between me (American) and the author, but there was a certain something that I just couldn't get past.
> - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.
Personally, I vastly prefer SF that collides with "reality", like Philip K. Dick's.
From the interview:
> But now, many of the most famous male stars here embrace their feminine qualities.
I guess that interview was done before the current cultural purge started.
The price of publicly opposing Xi Jinping's policies is disappearing for a year or so then making a scripted subdued apology on CCTV.
The perfidious thing is that even emigrating doesn't put you out of Xi Jinping's grasp. It's well documented how pressure is applied to vocal opponents of the new Leaders policies by going after their families in China.
It's well known that all the local Chinese language newspapers toe the party line, and Chinese community groups (especially Skykiwi) are infiltrated by the CCP to a rather large extent, and if you're overly critical, well, hopefully you managed to get residence visas for 奶奶 / nǎi nai and 姥姥 / lǎo lao beforehand.
Also, expect to be ostracised by the emigrant Chinese community.
Oh, and even if you're not Chinese, but you're critical of China, well...
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/the-curious-case-of-the-burgle...
It's always a good idea to pull the racism card in Germany, especially against the truth.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3124849/ch...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/covid-kids-book-pulped-a...
This example looks cute, but people can't even imagine what the propagandistic future of this cold war will look like.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/08/the-chinese-communist-p...
If you're a Chinese national, speaking out publicly against the CCP affects your family too. Even if you were out of reach of the CCP, there's nothing preventing them from disappearing your relatives.
Great ideas, plot-twists but characters and their arcs are sometimes boring sometimes bizarre.
Overall I would recommend it for his thought provoking ideas.
The recent TV adaptation is pretty interesting, though. It's more of a loose adaptation and I think they've done a good job with adding more dimension to some of the characters.
Predicting the future is surprisingly hard.
The world is threatened by an alien species and different people have different strategies for deference. They need to pick something that can't be predicted and defeated. Essentially earth needs a collective poker face while rapidly innovating a unique solution.
There is an implied parallel between human behavior and quantum particles. Our decisions are influenced by the information we have and signals from people and our surroundings. Quantum particle movement is influenced by the dynamic combination of forces on it. Both have probable outcomes from an observable state, but that observation influences the behavior of both.
I'm left thinking about the nature of reality. Some things are probable, and some seem random. When we see an option we like, we can nudge the situation towards it. When we don't like the options, we can take a walk or try something new and shake up the probability field we exist in to generate new options.
We can't predict the future because it depends on a series of interactions that have unpredictable outcomes. The three body problem explains how this is difficult to compute linearly. The best we can do is identify probabilities based on the information we have and our understanding of the model.
Quantum particles exist in a wave until they are observed in a specific point. When the wave function collapses, it goes from being probably here, to definitely there. I experience this in situations with dynamic outcomes. IE, I think this client is likely to sign today, but they may not. Sports plays are another good example. When we no longer have the ball in our frame of reference, it is probably somewhere in the direction we last saw it go. When it's in the goal, everyone sees it there.
It leads me to think about free will. We can go with the flow and give in to our influences. Or we can be decisive and do something else. The effects of our actions influence others in expected and unpredictable ways. I can have a great time being passive, just watching a movie or having a drink. I also enjoy being creative and taking risks. I get to experience the things other people contribute and share what I've found. I don't know what's out there beyond our understanding, but I've come to really appreciate the system we exist in.
archive.is is your friend in these cases.
If beggars can be choosers ...I wish there was a download PDF option as well or a simplified reading view display option.
Even himself cannot see how vastly different between his own ideal and the reality in his writing.
For example, LIU proclaimed Arthur Clark as his role model. But his writing just has little resemblance of Clark's detailed subtle and mind grabbing magic. Liu's works always are presenting a grand idea, but presenting details from normal guys perspective. That makes it more of a Asimov writter. But his ideas are often more abstract than Asimov's, and make them closer to what Frank Herbert did in dune, but again, Herbert's work had much better dialogue and subtlety than LIU's.
And of course, because of the vastly different cultural background, most of the details are lost to western readers, making them, although still fluent thanks to the nice translation, througly bland in all aspects other than the high ideas.
Even the name of the trilogy is an allegory on the "three countries" — a historical novell any Chinese speaker will instantly recognise.
Now, we have similarly 3 nuclear superpower countries: Russia, USA, and China. The question he wanted to ask was "How will the three will act when it will come to press the big red button?"
“Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” Liu said, adding: “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.”
I wonder if that’s also something where his vision collides with reality.
The same logic Liu uses here is the same argument slave societies used to justify themselves; that: "If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth," is exactly the same logic that Slave Owners used to justify the permanent enslavement of millions of people.
These are some profoundly shameful words. I'm genuinely shocked that anyone on Hacker News would consider Liu a decent human being.
One from the future or some utopian free-love society could argue that 21st century western neoliberal capitalist states with police and criminal justice systems as they are and economic systems as they are are themselves permanent enslavement of millions of people.
And if you'd argue 'well, I believe in abolishing the police, ending the drug war, and UBI for all' I'm sure they could still find parts of your worldview that would be pretty much just enslavement. Maybe the idea of pet ownership, of forced education of what we currently call 'children', maybe some taboo around sex or love.
In which case, that future person could say that they're genuinely shocked that anyone on Hacker News could consider _you_ a decent human being.
My point is simply, there's no simple 'obvious' answer when it comes an ethical / moral / economic question as large as this. It's a question of trade-offs and optimizing for different goals / values / metrics.
This is such a perfect example of how delusional one's ideology can make them.
This is just a fish not recognizing the water.
But the interesting thing that Liu accomplished with these books, is communicating how it feels to be faced with a technologically superior adversary intent on colonizing you. That’s not something most modern Americans and many others have ever experienced, but Liu made it universally relatable.
Worse, you have a means of leveling the playing field, rapidly catching up, but your leaders and society keep making poor decisions, preventing you from doing so - trusting the Trisolarians after Luo Ji became Swordholder, Luo Ji’s successor, banning light speed research, strategy for defending against a Dark Forest strike, etc.
That is probably what it felt like living under the CCP for a long time - Great Leap Forward (famine), Cultural Revolution (destruction of knowledge and science), etc. all unnecessary setbacks to China's advancement.
I suspect that’s partly why the books have captured so many people’s imaginations, it's an exploration of cultural systems and psychology as much of scifi.
We’ll just agree to disagree
I'm usually quite alert to such things, and didn't see it. In part, it seemed like a way to talk about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution - which would seem to work against nationalism.
It's been a long time since I read it - can you give some broad examples?
- The Doomsday Battle best matches the British Chinese Opium War
- The aliens are a seemingly advanced adversary that's in decline. Guess who's in decline right now?
> Guess who's in decline right now?
That's current CCP propaganda. Because it's current, it wasn't being said when The Three Body Problem was written (first published 2006, afaik). Because it's propaganda, let's not cite it as fact.
Most of what I wrote is my personal opinion since the author hasn’t openly admitted the metaphors. Many historians agree that the US has been in decline for decades now. It is not a new idea that the CCP just recently invented
Isn't this basically saying "If you read the bad guys as the West, then the novel portrays the West as the bad guys"?
It's an extremely antifeminist trilogy and clearly intended to be so. The alternative apt title would be 'How feminism destroys civilizations'.
I don't think there's a spoiler tag on HN, so I wrote it as vaguely as it can be without spoiling the story.
(please note I'm just describing how the book is, not making a statement about feminism)
Given the cultural context of the book and the author, "humans are fuckups" is a fully justified worldview, IMO (even though I'd prefer more "humans are awesome" literature; Liu Cixin's trilogy was really depressing).
Granted, the disastrous action of Ye was somewhat offset by the inspiration she gave Luo Ji. (In the long run, she was still responsible for the deaths of billions.) But Cheng is something else entirely. The plot of a book is entirely up to its author. The time scale portrayed is many hundreds of years. It would have been possible to have conjured up a male character to take at least one of the several treacherous and/or civilization-destroying actions Cheng took. Maybe the character of Wade could have been that, but in retrospect even this clumsy caricature of an amoral reptilian white American CIA asshole always made the right choices with respect to the survival of humanity.
I really enjoyed the trilogy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have this specific flaw (and several others besides). Reading antifeminism is not the reader's fault; it's right there in the text.
Also, all good guys were chinese, and later all characters were chinese. The only people who survived it all were... and so on. 1 westerner there was the bad guy, and executed.
Hollywood has similar issue with US-centric approach btw, not sure how visible from within, but from outside its a long running joke.
I hate the book (and while the people who told me it got better fooled me once, I'm certainly not going to read the other two and let them fool me twice) and can't understand where all the praise comes from.
I think there's probably a decent short story to be extracted from the key idea in the second book.
At no point it felt for me like a waste of time, I agree most of the characters are bland, but the questions opened in the book are all societal, not about the individuals themselves.
Probably from the other two. I've read them all one after the other, so when I talk about 3BP, I have trouble separating the book from the larger trilogy.
> The videogame works by magic.
What was magical about it? I don't remember anything especially weird here.
> The alien "protons" work by magic.
This was explained in detail (modulo sci-fi magic in the explanation), but I'm not sure if in 3BP or in Dark Forest. Other major tech advantages of the aliens were also explained in the latter books.
IIRC the general tech level was essentially the recent past, but the technology to support this full-body VR game existed with no other consequences. And I think there was also an implication that it was multiplayer with another star system? (again, through unexplained technology with no other consequences).
With Foundation in particular, I'm perplexed when I see it being criticized for lack of character depth, given that the books literally beat the reader over their head with multiple levels of reminders that the books are about large forces shaping societies, forces infinitely greater than individuals, and the only special thing about particular characters is that they happened to be at the right place and time when large changes happened[0].
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[0] - The Mule aside, but (rot13 - spoilers from "Second Foundation") juvyr gur Zhyr qvq chfu uvfgbel va na hacerqvpgnoyr qverpgvba ol iveghr bs uvf vaqvivqhny fcrpvnyarff, nsgre uvf qrngu, tnynpgvp pvivyvmngvbaf erghearq gb gurve abezny ribyhgvba. Rira gur Frpbaq Sbhaqngvba qvqa'g vasyhrapr guvatf zhpu gb guvf cbvag, naq qvqa'g vasyhrapr gurz zhpu cnfg gung cbvag.
In the author’s note for Foundation’s Edge, he says that, upon re-reading his earlier work, “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No action. No physical suspense… each book in the trilogy had at least two stories and lacked unity.”
But it's also true that author's opinions after the fact have limited bearing on the work. People like me, who like the Trilogy as they read it, like it for what it is.
I didn't mention Foundation's Edge because, beyond being a bit more action and suspense-packed, it departs a bit from the "no special individuals" rule. Incidentally, it's not the protagonist that's special in my opinion. Spoilers (rot13) follow:
Juvyr gur punenpgref va gur obbx ercrngrqyl zragvba Tbyna Gerivmr'f fcrpvny tvsgf, vg'f erirnyrq gung ur'f bayl fcrpvny va gur Naguebcvp Cevapvcyr'f frafr: ur jnf gur crefba gung unccrarq gb or gur orfg nybat zrgevpf Tnvn jnf vagrerfgrq va, fb ur tbg envyebnqrq vagb orvat n cvibgny punenpgre. Vg'f Tnvn gung'f gur fcrpvny bar, orpnhfr vg'f orra qbvat gur fryrpgvat.
Except for The God's Themselves, which feels like he was channeling a better writer.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rot13/bahejodllcom...
I guess my own critique would be that the style maybe didn't survive the translation. To each his own :p
It turns out that humanity can be limited by policy and moderated by social engineering technology. So im now careful optimistic about these things. We will not perish because we handed weapons of doom to one of the uncamped billions.