- 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.
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.
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 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 ?
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 liked the books so I guess my vast collection of classical and modern SF is not real scotsman.
> 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.
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).
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...
- 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 mean, in fairness, this is basically traditional in sci-fi; characterisation that wasn't terrible was a bit of a novelty until quite recently.
No, I hated the first one.
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.
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 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.
Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.
What do you consider real SF?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.