Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future | Hacker News Reader

Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future

vincelwt.com

160 pointsvincelt188 comments

I’m currently reading the trilogy, and while it’s an entertaining enough read I don’t really understand the fascination with it. The overall plot is a bit simplistic, characters are wooden and storytelling awkward (but that might be an effect if Chinese literal tradition). Besides, the sci-fi elements are fairly weak and inconsistent.

I mean, I can see that a reader who is used to the run of the mill contemporary sci-fi or fantasy would see this trilogy with its plot twists and big topics as some kind of masterpiece, but that’s a pretty low bar to beat. I can also see comparison with Asimov novels (it’s pretty clear that Liu tries to follow the narrative style of Foundation in his own way), but let’s be real here - Asimov wrote the core of his stuff hundred years ago and he pioneered the relevant plot devices. The main narrative innovation of Liu is the idea of total surveillance (no matter how hand-wavy it is introduced) and the rest is mostly poking around with a stick and awkwardly bringing plot points together.

The writing is bad, but the sci-fi elements blend with history and real life perfectly. There's a reason Obama gave a blurb for it.

There are great threads in there. The dark forest as an illustration of paranoia matches up with the culture of fear in unstable political climates, and is also a hopeful description of peace in a nuclear time. "Hot contact" with an advanced alien race mirrors the US and China. The exploration of hidden information with sophons, wallfacers, and star signaling.

Foundation was written when the US was cementing its empire. It thinks about legacy, decline and planning. The series reads as safe, cozy, paternal (some of the main antagonists are petty bureaucrats and gentle public disapproval).

Three Body is much more chaotic, jumbled, in the trenches. The systems are bigger and stronger than the people, practically and narratively. Asimov's robots were essentially human, dealing with how to be good citizens. It's all human scale. Liu's people are triggers for events far larger than themselves.

I often wonder if it's the writing that's bad or the translation.

I really get the impression lots of the sentences and paragraphs are stilted translations which don't succeed, either because of the translator of the inability of english to express the nuance of what the artist meant. To be clear, I think the latter limitation goes both ways, indeed any time you are translating between languages.

Ken Liu, who translated the first and third books, is a respected English sci fi writer in his own right, as well as being a native Chinese speaker.

I felt the same as you about the prose but, given Liu’s background and having read his other books, I assumed it was an intentional choice. Based on his other work, Ken is a good enough writer to know what he was doing, and the sentence structure was probably a balance between translating the ideas and translating the form. You can definitely argue with how it worked out but I do think it was mostly intentional and not a lack of writing or translating skills on the part of Ken Liu.

I will say, the middle book, “The Dark Forest,” was translated by someone else, and it felt way different to me. Sentence structure, pacing, themes, stuff that would be way out of scope of a direct translation. I always wondered how much of that was the original and how much was the translator doing more adaptation to make the whole book feel like a native English novel.

He's also done a lot of other translations from Chinese (Broken Stars anthology for example) that I don't think have the same problems.

i read the three-body problem in chinese, but didn't read the translation. my impression was that liu cixin's writing isn't very literary - he rarely uses rhetorical flourishes or idiomatic expressions, and his vocabulary is very simple outside of technical language. however, it's very straightforward and accessible.

someone else i know described the novel as 'clearly written by an engineer rather than a humanities student,' and i think i'd agree with that description.

Engineers and scientists can be like that. Perhaps the most obvious English-language one is Andy Weir (The Martian, etc) where the characters can feel like they're agents implementing an story rather than part of it. But certainly author-first authors can lean into this too and end up writing basically a narrative report rather then a story.

Which is, to be clear, completely fine: sometimes the characters aren't actually the core of a story, especially when dealing with substantially non-human-scale subjects and abstract concepts. It's also much more of a challenge to keep characters front and centre when on a very large sci-fi stage. It's easy to concentrate on the people when it's just a few people in, say, a regular house, just doing human things. I think some of the genius of Iain M. Banks especially is that he manages to somehow place the people (and non-people like Ships) dead centre even though the stories are ostensibly on an incomprehensibly vast scale. It's one of the few sci-fi universes where I think first of the characters and not of the universe in which they exist.

The original Star Wars and Dune also had particularly good character-centrism, where the universes were clearly enormous and could be arbitrarily detailed, but existed to support the characters journeys rather then the reverse.

I ran into that issue when trying to read Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The translation for the first two books in the series was ok but not amazing, but for the third book they changed the translator and it became a complete and utter mess. I remember one part where a character says the complete opposite of what they said the previous sentence, and I'm 99% sure it was an issue with the translation and not with the original Japanese.

Still better than the copy of Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings that I once found that appeared to have been copy-pasted into Google Translate at least.

I think I'd lean more towards the latter than the former, the translator (Ken Liu) is a very gifted writer in his own rights.

> There are great threads in there. The dark forest as an illustration of paranoia matches up with the culture of fear in unstable political climates, and is also a hopeful description of peace in a nuclear time. "Hot contact" with an advanced alien race mirrors the US and China. The exploration of hidden information with sophons, wallfacers, and star signaling.

Yes. It's very specifically linked to the Cultural Revolution, and the question of how it's possible to know things in an environment that's specifically intended to prevent you finding out the Truth - whether that's communist China, or a universe in which distant aliens can mess with your particle physics experiments.

The writing necessary to support the exploration of this idea ends up being very didactic - the huge VR section in Three Body Problem - but then so does Neal Stephenson.

I really enjoyed the CR section. After a lot of “save the cat” style prose it’s refreshing to read something new. Even though it doesn’t follow the rules from the average writing community college writing class

Is the "bad" writing partially just different cultural values of the writer? Lots of people object to the emphasis on female beauty in the Dark Forest, along with the subplot of finding the "perfect" mate.

Yes, my wife found the emphasis on female beauty to be awkwardly written, as though by a man with no experience with women seemingly writing a fantasy to himself. It caused her to put the book down for several months because it was too grating, and the subplot itself too boring.

I found it uninteresting and a bit too astray from the bigger story, but it didn't offend me or anything. It was a little striking how much the "perfect" mate in question was objectified so relentlessly; like some sort of vessel, a means to the admirer's ends, and nothing more.

It does basically fit into the plot, which has several game theory situations like this. Luo Ji is a hedonist and isn't invested in saving the world. By following his desires, the Wallfacer program gives him a family that they can take away. So as a result, Luo Ji is forced to actually care about winning and the Trisolarans don't know what to think, er, say, about what's really going on.

Oh, great point. In retrospect that's quite clear but I think I didn't properly embed some information because the larger theme wasn't so enthralling. Thanks for the correction – I won't criticize something I clearly didn't understand.

This could actually explain (at least in part) that relentless objectification. It would drive home the hedonism, so to speak. Perhaps my wife and I overlooked that because we were distracted by not enjoying the theme.

I think it's bad in more than one perspective. For me it was the Space Politruks unsubtly added to the story without any plot value.

I liked it a lot more than Asimov's, for what it's worth. It's one of my favorite stories so, yes, I would say it's a masterpiece. The plot is not simplistic and the characters do not appear wooden to me.

The Expanse I liked even better (at least until the last book or two), though it probably helped that I didn't have trouble remembering the names. My western bias shows in that I had a lot of trouble telling apart the chinese names even on the second "read" (audio book) of the 3BP trilogy, especially when they then add nicknames into the mix. Da Chu and Chu Cheng are the same person¹, but besides him and a few other main characters, I had to get who's who from context. (And, pardon, but calling people Ding, Dong, and Meow takes me out of the story the first few mentions.) Whether I'd still like The Expanse more if I didn't have this problem in 3BP... hmm, probably yes because there's this 'political correctness' stuff that isn't really my thing, but it would certainly be a close call.

¹ Now that I look it up on Wikipedia, it's apparently spelled Shi Qiang and Da Shi. (Original spelling is from memory, last time I listened to the books was about a year ago)

I'm Chinese but not fluent in mandarin and I struggle with Chinese names. I wouldn't feel too bad about it...

Mainstream "English" names (like James, Mark, Lily, Sarah etc) are essentially independent words whereas Chinese names are compositions of characters which are much more opaque to non-speakers. Not to mention that that romanisation is lossy see how `Wu` contains numerous different surnames[0]. (Aside, I only recently found out similarly for Vietnamese `Nguyen` can also include more than one surname)

Without the additional meaning they're just symbols and good luck differentiating between Zhang Chang Zang or Zu Zhu or Min and Ming etc

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_(surname)#:~:text=W%C3%BA....

The Da (Big) / Xiao (Small) prefixes are direct translations of family honorifics that in the simple case directly indicate the relative age of one family member to another. The more common use for family is with more layers of indirection -- so when referring to my mother's younger sister, I would say "Xiao Ai" (Little Aunt), and when referring to my mother's older sister, it would be "Da Ai" (Big Aunt).

In this case I imagine it was more in a professional context, so "Shi Qiang" -- family name "Shi", given name "Qiang" -- was likely elder or the superior of people around them, so would be called "Da Shi" (Big Shi / Boss Shi). If Shi Qiang were the younger, they'd likely be called "Xiao Shi" (Little Shi / Subordinate Shi).

I think there's enough great literature out there you don't have to feel bad for not being able to enjoy a particular piece, even if it's for unusual reasons. As an example, there's a novel with a good reputation and fascinating plot summary I found unreadable because one of its quirks is that the protagonist doesn't have gender so the pronoun use in the narration is effectively random. Trying to read that was like turning my ADHD up to 11 and I had to give it up.

Liu Cixin is a bad author, in all regards. Still, the Asimov comparison holds water in that Asimov never could write a character anyone cares about either. He does seem to be more self-aware of it than Cixin is though. Cixin actually tries to write personalities, whereas Asimov bypasses them. Clarke bypasses them. Very unfortunately, late Stephenson largely falls into the same pattern, despite standing quite a bit above the rest. Though Stephenson obviously built on the foundation (hue) Asimov and Clarke established, so it's not fully fair to compare them.

In short, these books are bad. Cixin is closer to NK Jemisin than other Nebula Award winners.

I love the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but Stephenson's characters in Seveneves far outstrip any in these 3 books

Could just be me, but I only remember the full context of the cannibal leader char in Seveneves. I could tell you some abstraction of "There was that programmer woman from the miner magnate family and there was that one guy that was hanging out with the eves", but it's all pretty blurry. I don't remember anyone from Anathem. My main issue is that I can't even tell you who the main character of Seveneves was, if there was one. I remember that there was one in Anathem, but could I tell you anything about him? Nope, just good sci fi. I remember everyone from Snow Crash, and I definitely remember the main char from Diamond Age, her dad, the guy he robbed, etc.

I stopped reading Stephenson after.

> late Stephenson

Which Stephenson are you referring to?

Neal Stephenson's later work. My wording definitely could have been better.

Seveneves? Great scenario and ideas, but I couldn't care less about any of the characters, and I probably don't remember any. Still enjoyed the read a lot though.

Probably meant "of late"

Not to pile on too much, but I feel very similarly. It seems like about 80% of the way through the first book (beginning with the Panama Canal attack), Liu gave up on trying to write characters and started trying to compensate with bigger (and admittedly very cool) sci-fi set pieces. Overall, the first book had a good set of strong characters (Ye Wenjie, Wang Miao, Da Shi) and was still good enough to be one of my favorites.

The second book still had some good character writing (mostly in Zhang Beihai, although Luo Ji had a okay arc), but I felt like the plot really meandered to the point where I almost put the book down before the reveal of the Dark Forest concept, which was interesting and novel enough to compel me to finish.

The final book has the whole kitchen sink of cool sci-fi conceits thrown at it, but there are even fewer memorable characters, and the plot time-jumps so many times that it feels like the antithesis of “show, don’t tell”.

What’s sad is that the core storytelling skill of Liu is clearly there (for example, with the fairy-tale allegories), but it’s so buried under the drive to introduce a new technology every chapter that it’s hard to appreciate the final book as a good novel.

Yes I have to agree, sci-fi/technology parts are properly novel, creative and give you the reason to want to read more. I presume in 50 years it will be less so but thats fine. But characters are flat, simple even, and I really didn't care about most of them.

Without giving major spoilers about the end, its china and chinese above rest of humanity, every single non-chinese I recall is portrayed as evil. Also the end was properly disappointing. Can't call a novel great with such big flaws, but I understand why HN crowd likes it so much.

For what's worth, I enjoyed ie Hyperion cantos much more. A bit less quantum gadgetry (or is it) but basically 7 very different stories ranging from space operas to nearly cyberpunk and characters I enjoyed following till very end.

Hyperion is literature and art, besides having just as many mind blowing scifi ideas. Its easily my favorite.

> the Panama Canal attack

I gave up at that point. (spoilers). Recovering hard drives from an 'enemy' ship travelling through a canal by slicing it into small pieces with monofilament cables. I think even 12-year old me would have this completely barking.

the final book has the most infuriating, idiotic and worst character I've read in scifi. She repeatedly makes the worst possible choice, literally is responsible first for humanity being enslaved and then being wiped out, before making sure the entire bloody universe is wiped out, and at each stage is not only forgiven, but never questioned, celebrated by everyone else, and given even more power.

If a character caused you emotion doesn't that make it a good character?

> What’s sad is that the core storytelling skill of Liu is clearly there (for example, with the fairy-tale allegories), but it’s so buried under the drive to introduce a new technology every chapter that it’s hard to appreciate the final book as a good novel.

Hopefully the TV show (I assume there will be one) can tighten it up, like they did with GoT

Similar reaction. My favorite fiction genre has always been SF, particularly hard SF. Having read so much, it's hard to find something that really catches my interest with its novelty. I started reading the trilogy because I kept hearing that it was so good and had a lot of novelty. Well, the 1st book was a struggle, IMHO pretty bad writing, but I kept at it because people said it got better. It didn't. Then I started the 2nd and got half way through before I gave up on the writing ever getting any better. I skimmed through the 3rd to see what I might miss and was really unimpressed. Now, of course people have different tastes, but I can't see why people who say they like hard SF think these are good books.

Same. Malevolent far away creatures with such power to perceive everything on Earth and understand what they are seeing enough to make a countdown timer appear in someone's visual field could probably think of cleverer ways to destroy us. The "science" was implausible. It might be a scary idea in a fantasy setting - demons from another dimension or something - but science fiction has rules.

Even Donnie Darko with a wormhole in his chest was more plausible.

Thanks for sharing! Last two years I've been feeling like I'm taking crazy pills with all the hype for the trilogy. I finished the first book with high uncertainty if I should even open the second one, which I did, only to put it back after 50 pages.

It's not necessarily bad (subjective after all) but there's an argument that it lacks many elements to be considered a masterpiece. Even accounting lost-in-translation-ness, you still have a more or less average storytelling structure, with not that much innovative elements. Hype definitely makes an average work turn into something annoying if you happen to disagree with the hive mind. I did like the part about the mass computer and the sequential cycles. The narration of that arc was super enjoyable.

I felt like you do until about two thirds of the way through the second book, which is where things really pick up. These books have since become some of my favorites.

I understand where you're coming from, but I encourage you to try and power through to the end of the second book. The things you complain about are long gone by then, and you might change your mind like I did!

Second book was a struggle for me. The wallfacer stuff was fairly boring to me and the extremely misogynistic way to long passages of „Luo Ji the incel meets young Werther“ we’re just infuriating. I has to literally skip pages there. Then there were admittedly some unexpected plot twists followed by a very banal climax aka. Dark Forest which was telegraphed from the start, with only real mystery being how nobody in 200 years didn’t reach this extremely obvious conclusion.

Thanks for the advice. Will add Dark Forest to my queue.

It's a bit like Jean Michel Jarre's concerts in China. It's not by far the best that we've produced but it was the first to be performed at that scale in a culture that had relatively little contact with Western music. The flip side is that very few Chinese books make it to the West in translation, and as such it is both a first and a sample at the same time, it may not be the greatest book ever written but it certainly isn't the worst either. Hailing it as a masterpiece is a bit over the top but then again, if that incentivizes publishers to translate more books from Chinese to English then it has my vote.

FWIW I'm pretty old school when it comes to SF and found it readable but certainly not at the level of the holy trinity.

What's the holy trinity?

Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke.

Obviously there are many more great science fiction writers and many that preceded them that set the stage.

https://sfandfantasy.co.uk/php/the-big-3.php

Bradbury?

Yeah the extended sequence where the dude invents an imaginary waifu and then he uses his all-powerful position to find her? And he actually believes that she’s cool with this?

The writing is awful and has no sense of psychological realism, and falls into the typical “logical science man” who can do no wrong, really the sci-fi equivalent of a mary sue. Sure the ideas are neat but I’d rather read a synopsis than this cardboard writing.

I think it was implied that the girl was a government spy and used plastic surgery and the copius amount of details given to Da Shi to play a role. That being said i think the whole premise is somewhat sexist.

Man that part is really awful. I have skipped over it entirely on subsequent re-reads.

I found The Three Body Problem disappointing. The "big idea" was more of a magical contraption which couldn't work in practice (there's no true 2D in our space), and the scene with the tanker mentioned in another comment was utterly unbelievable. That can't just have been the translation.

Around the same time, I read Exhalation by Chiang, who is of Chinese descent. That was a truly wonderful book, which addresses "big themes" in short stories. If you haven't read it, here's a rather big idea I'd never encountered before: what if the Biblical creation story is true, but God doesn't seem to listen? How alone would we be?

Chiang is absolutely amazing, and my only criticism of him is that he needs to write MORE!

Hell is the Absence of God is probably my all-time favorite spec-fic story (from his other anthology, Stories of Your Life). The dude's fiction is phenomenal.

I also didn't really love the Three Body Problem, even though many of my friends did, I had a similar review to you. (Didn't read the subsequent ones. I am a heavy SF reader, although of course i don't like everything I read, even if other heavy SF readers did!).

I wondered, like some in this thread, if it had something to do with Chinese writing styles and/or translation.

BUT. I actually really loved Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang -- translated into English by the same translator as the Three Body Problem, Ken Liu!

I think I could recognize some overlap in 'style' in writing between the two, like a certain literal descriptiveness and lack of a lot of psychological interiority. I don't know for sure if that comes from Chinese writing styles, or the translator, or just a coincidence/my imagination.

But I really liked Vagabonds a lot, despite not liking the Three Body Problem. I really recommend Vababonds! It's still a pretty philosophical book. About the experience of immigration to a culture other than you grew up in (and then return), among others. But I found the philosophical topics more engaging, and the story interesting, and the characters sympathetic and identifiable. I cared what the outcome of the plot would be, while also finding the philosophy engaging.

I'm still a bit surprised as to the Three Body Problem being so popular, don't totally understand it!

Not all good books have to be high literature about well-developed characters going on emotional journeys and learning about themselves or whatever. We can use books about thought-provoking big ideas with some twists thrown in.

This is a strawman. There is a whole lot in the middle between "wooden" characters and "high literature about well-developed characters going on emotional journeys...". One can write an interesting character without attempting highfalutin literature.

Time and capacity is finite. There may be authors capable of creating both deep characters and insightful stories/settings in the same work - but there are more authors who are capable of only one or the other.

I understand you consider good characters the necessary part of a good work. For me, the necessary part is the ideas/setting/worldbuilding - good characters are nice to have, but they're not what I'm reading sci-fi for. Which means we'll both appreciate the stories of those few authors that nail both criteria, but otherwise we'll have opposite preferences.

Case in point: I liked the 3BP trilogy very much.

While many of the plot devices and tropes are core to sci fi, the delivery method is very different. I don't think the characters are wooden so much as presented and characterized differently than in western sci fi. It's a lot like watching a Korean drama vs. an American one in terms of the way that the arc unfolds and the suspension of disbelief that's expected.

The Dark Forest is a great book and the first one is alright. The fascination mainly stems from having a non-western sci-fi point of view since most other sci-fi books always were written from a Western protagonist standpoint. Also the backdrop is the cultural revolution which riles up a lot of people.

The simplicity is part of the aesthetic. IMO the trilogy is more philosophical exercise than narrative, so if you weren't looking for that then it makes sense you wouldn't be too hype about it.

At risk of spoiling things, I do recommend you go til the end, it's quite a journey

I actually enjoyed reading about what characters in the book come up with, in terms of ideas for solving difficult situations. Quite clever really. Also I did not find the characters to be too "wooden". They have their individual mentality or views on life and act according to those.

It is not the best science fiction novel series I have ever read (that would probably be the original Dune novels), but it is a good one in my book (ha).

Having not read any of Liu's works: how exactly is the idea of total surveillance a narrative innovation of Liu's?

I'm reminded of Arthur C Clarke's The Light of Other Days; that to me was total surveillance.

[Spoiler alert I guess]

Having only read the wiki page for The Light of Other Days (now very interested in reading the book, thanks!), it seems you’re mostly right, with the difference in Liu’s work being that total surveillance of earth is achieved by an alien species from another galaxy.

Ah that is slightly different. To me, Light of Other Days is very much a thought experiment into how humanity would deal with the complete eradication of privacy; while initially the technology is only in the hands of a few, eventually it is made accessible to virtually everyone.

It's less about some outside force surveiling (whether aliens or big corporations), and more about what happens when surveillance becomes a basic fact of life (e.g. why wear clothes if everyone can see you shower anyway?).

I also noticed that Liu cities Clarke as one of his inspirations according to Wikipedia, totally makes sense based on this thread.

I’m pretty sure The Light of Other Days is not really an Arthur C Clarke novel; it’s a Stephen Baxter novel with Clarke’s name on it. (Of course it could still be good.)

>by an alien species from another galaxy

In the book, trisolarans are from the Alpha Centaury system, the closest one to our own.

I found the first book in the trilogy to have more character and history stuff per unit of science fiction than I'd like. I felt like 50% could be removed without losing too much importance. But I'm so glad I stuck through, the follow-up books are excellent, and the whole story is amazing. I chose to listen to all three as audio-books; they made for an excellent commute before my 100% remote started.

I don't agree with the storytelling being awkward and the characters wooden. I do feel like the novels don't leave much to do after you've finished them, while in some other works you can dig and dig and dig and never stop, but I don't know if this is true or just me.

As for the sci-fi elements, just like with Hyperion I read these books as fantasy. It's in the future and they've got spaceship and robots, sure, and they often try to explain the technologies, but they do that in fantasy too when explaining how magic works.

In general I don't think much about stuff like "objective quality" when reading or watching something, and prefer to dig into the actual story or universe, or the story behind it (how did they get the idea and stuff like that).

I also felt the same way around the characters. They all felt very stiff to me. Not sure if it's the translation or if that's just how they're written.

I’ve seen an analysis that claimed that each character in 3BP represents an idea, and that’s why they don’t develop. Some of them do transform (once) and grow stale/useless after they got to shine.

It's not the translation. The writing is just bad. It isn't anywhere close to Hugo level work suggesting there was a payoff for international recognition.

The German translation was good in all three books IMHO. But yeah, it still felt foreign sometimes, but I guess this is caused by the fact that most of the characters are Chinese and thus act "foreign". I haven't read much sci-fi before, but have a fair bit after and found the trilogy to be my favorite. Currently I'm reading Arthur C. Clarke Childhood's End and like it so far.

the Dark Forest is an absolute masterpiece, from someone that has read a lot of classic sci-fi.

Liu Cixin has read a lot of classic sci-fi?

> I don’t really understand the fascination with it.

People who aren't used to sci-fi think the ideas in the book are mind blowing. It's like someone who has never heard rock music hearing a shitty cover of Sweet Child Of Mine.

I'm not a fan of the books either and as an avid reader, science fiction is my overwhelmingly favorite genre.

Still, I think this is unfair. Lots of hard core scifi fans love them. I don't get it, either, but let's all be ok with people appreciating that which we do not without insulting or questioning their taste.

I don't think what I said is insulting. TBP comes up in conversation surprisingly often, and the reason is always the "mind-blowing ideas" in the book. The idea that tropes only seem novel to the uninitiated isn't insulting to the uninitiated. It might be insulting to the author who wrote that drek, but I could say much worse about TBP.

if you want some interesting sci fi. I've just finished "the Saturn Run" by John Sandford and Ctein.

One of those stories like Portal 1/2 I'd like to forget and be able re-experience for the first time

Liu seems to put stress on the world view instead of giving detail about characters. Many Chinese authors are pretty good at shaping characters, such as Lu Yao. He doesn't write sci-fi, though.

On the wooden characters. I subscribe to this point of view. Initially, I thought it was just the inability of the writer to write convincing motivations but the more I read it dawned on me that there is a serious socialist propaganda undertone in his brush when it comes to the Chinese characters and plots. Motivations are off and the discourse is as unbelievable as to make the characters seem like pure fantasy and not of the good kind. My opinion is that either he is hopelessly unable to escape the propaganda tone (with a serious reek of Young Guards) or he deliberately wrote (or rewrote) the offending parts to make the material more palatable to the censorship apparatus. The western characters in the novel are even worse. High notes on the scifi, abysmal on the human milieu.

> unable to escape the propaganda tone (with a serious reek of Young Guards)

We're still talking about the guy whose book opens on a bortherly civil war between two Young Guards factions, followed by a public lynching by the same guards, and a young girl ending in a re-education camp? An opening that has been damaging enough by Chinese censors to be moved a few chapters later in the Chinese edition of the book?

Yes, same guy. Please keep in mind that the rules on what reality is acceptable or not come down from Minitrue and they may change without prior warning. Look, I am speculating here as to the motives but the words, the phrases, the intonations, they all ring true in my ears. His characters sound and walk and talk as if they are copied down from the pages of Pravda, I kid you not.

Have you read it in Chinese? Or are you projecting your impressions of the USSR on 3BP? Have you thought that what rings to you like “authoritarian communist China” may just be “authoritarian for centuries China”?

For all I know you may be right on the writer, but judging the translated work of a guy from a country half a world away from your clichés on another country (I will assume you neither lived in nor speak/read the language) sounds a bit like a stretch to me.

Totally agree with poor plot and dialogue. But if you had read it on publication in 2008, viewing the aliens as US and Earth as China, you would have been one in a small minority to foresee something like the Oct 2022 Biden order to revoke citizenship from anyone working in the Chinese semiconductor industry.

It gets points for audacity that has been largely lacking in domestic production. It is forgiven various flaws, for that. Tackling big themes is hard enough that we are obliged to forgive much to get it. So we do.

> I don’t really understand the fascination

Decent sci-fi not written by a White heterosexual male. And for the first volume, a description of the Chinese revolution lot of people prefer to hide.

I think most hard sci-fi readers don’t give two hoots if their literature of choice is written by a western white man, Māori non-binary person or even an AI.

On topic, I deeply disagree with the original commenter, these books can easily stand shoulder to shoulder with series like The Expanse or the Zones of Thought trilogy (by Vernor Vinge).

> not written by a White heterosexual male

Completely unnecessary. Please don’t bring racism/sexism into your opinions of media.

I loved the trilogy even though I agree with various criticisms discussed here. But I think those can be easily forgiven if you’re trying to see the forest (heh) instead of the trees.

Yes the mechanics of reading are kind of a slog due to the translation, and constant repetition of full character names. You just have to figure out how to efficiently read it. And there are plenty of scientific and technological incongruities, of the form “if they had the tech to do X, why do they still do Y?” Sometimes there was a narrative reason for such, and the rest I just left to entertainment value while consuming a social commentary.

It was the first time I think encountering some narrative devices which I enjoyed. I liked seeing the dialogue with Trisolarans that appear in a sans-serif font. I liked the excerpts from A Past Outside of Time in Death’s End, although sometimes they wind up sort of repeating what had just happened in the previous chapter. Also the fairy tales in Death’s End I thought were some of the best writing and devices in the whole series.

I read the trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. But yes, not exactly hard sci-fi through and through. My favourite idea wasn't even really a sci-fi thing. I really liked the idea of the Wallfacers. Really clever bit of storytelling, I thought.

https://three-body-problem.fandom.com/wiki/Wallfacer (spoilers, I guess)

The Wallfacers were amazing. I also liked how "no good deed goes unpunished" applies to everyone who saves humanity from extinction. I suspect this is the part that actually rubs most people the wrong way.

While I highly enjoyed the trilogy (especially 'The Dark Forest'), the Science Fiction element of the story remains very soft. At no point does the author offer any meaningful explanation for any of the technologies used in the books.

I really liked the story, and enjoyed the ride, but as a fan of 'hard SF' such as the Expanse or the Mars trilogy, this book left me somewhat dissatisfied.

What is a "meaningful explanation" of technologies we have not yet created and science we have not yet discovered? In the limit, a work of "hard" "science" fiction ends up like a Star Trek episode scenario before the "tech" bits were filled-in - "Captain, the Tech is overteching. We must tech the tech" [1].

I've read the Expanse btw and it wasn't particularly more "hard" or any less made-up than anything else. I don't remember whether I've read the Mars trilogy.

_____________

[1] http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-te...

In the interest of full disclosure I'm a total trekkie. I even like ST:E (a lot).

>What is a "meaningful explanation" of technologies we have not yet created and science we have not yet discovered

The question is already not the right one to ask. Many technologies he thinks up flat out oppose our current understanding of physics, therefor there is no adequate explanation for them in any case.

Just to drill this point in a bit more because people often don't understand this: It's not just a case of "maybe we will discover new physics in the future that make this possible and the author writes in a sort of gap of our understanding", like good hard scifi authors, but more along the lines of "the author doesn't understand physics and this fantasy technology they dream up relies on apples falling up instead of down when you throw them".

99.9% of the time when any author writes something that is FTL-related for example, this is the case. It's really just a few authors who bend the rules in reasonable ways enough and then introduce good enough restrictions so it can be believably handwaved away.

A lot of physics related descriptions in the Trisolarian books are also wildly innacurate and based on an extremely superficial laymans understanding of physics. That section where they house a black hole in that one custom facility for example, ugh.

Isn't this the opposite of hard science fiction? In my mind, hard science fiction is that where the science rules of the setting permeate and constrain the story, rather than being things to fill in.

That said, I see more and more that people are accepting an alternative definition of hard science fiction, which is simply a way of distinguishing science fiction that does not involve outright magic from the fantasy/sf that does.

There is another view of the hard/soft sci-fi scale that has gained popularity among younger (i.e. under-30) commentators and reviewers where the scale is from: soft == any and all science things, discussions, or principles are merely set dressings to tell a story; hard == the science is the basis for the work and the consequences, interactions, etc of dealing with or addressing the ‘science things’ is the purpose of the work

It’s kind of like saying the scale goes from just telling a story set on a space ship to writing a dissertation on long-haul space flight’s effects on human behaviors, which might have a narrative through line.

I am not really sure I even like the premise of this usage of hard/soft sci-fi, I am much more prone to use the possible/impossible technology type of scale when discussing ‘hardness’ of sci-fi, but I don’t get to dictate the usage of language.

The two are correlated. To write proper hard sci-fi in your sense, you have to a) understand the relevant science and engineering (and I mean understand - not necessarily to a PhD level, but enough that you can reason about the phenomena and principles on your own), and b) let it permeate and constrain the plot. This naturally makes it more likely that a hard sci-fi story will be about "science things", because science and engineering not only constrain your plot, but you also have to explain their basics to the audience, which takes space.

Conversely, the soft end of sci-fi has a lot more authors with little to no familiarity with the relevant sciences, and even less care for them.

There are obviously exceptions to this "new hardness scale", but I think overall the two scales give almost identical readings in practice. And personally, I'm not against the new scale either, because it aligns with what I personally care about. That is, I want to read sci-fi that's hard on this new scale. I like my sci-fi to be about science, technology, social dynamics, and everything other than individuals and their emotional journeys and petty conflicts. There's enough of that in every other genre, not to mention, in real life itself.

> even like ST:E (a lot).

Pity that they cancelled that show as soon as it was getting interesting.

It's quite stellar that readers come away from some of these series with such different notions.

Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one.

Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.

I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology?

On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.

"Hardness" in science fiction is scarcely an academical subject of literature. I personally like Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness [0] but not beyond a thought excercise.

If you can, find me a published author stating "I wrote this story strictly in terms of a level 5 in the Mohs scale"; there will be none (unless they're targeting reddit as a reader base).

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScal...

> Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.

I cannot believe this to be true. While I'm wary of the "no True Scotsman" aspect to the term "hard sf", TBP and it's sequels are about as hard as jello.

Honestly, the author would have been better off allowing things to just be hand wavey instead of poorly explaining everything.

TBP's sophon is one of the most blithely nonsensical sci-fi technologies I have ever read. I found it far, far more egregious than the Expanse's magical alien molecule, to the point it put me off reading other books in the trilogy. IMO it disqualifies TBP from the hard sci-fi category entirely, but I admit I might be a bit too worked up about it.

Spoilers from the Expanse ahead...

The protomolecule turned people into vomit zombies with a collective hive mind that could communicate instantaneously across the solar system and move an asteroid defying all laws of gravity, with the ultimate secret intent of building an interstellar wormhole.

Again, in the series (at least early on) humans are quite limited by known constraints and it would easily be considered hard scifi in many regards. But its central conceit was no less blithely nonsensical than that of TBP's - I simply can't understand how someone could put one in the hard category but disqualify the other.

I've only read two books of the Expanse, what I've read is a bit soft, but I would argue it is harder than TBP.

I think one key difference for me is that we are not told what the protomolecule is, so we can imagine it is some kind of massive DNA-like structure packed with enzymes and whatnot that can plow through biological material and reorganize it. That is a plausible start. Then, sure, it may overdo the capabilities a bit.

The sophon, though, we are told exactly what it is: it is a proton unfolded into a 2D plane on which a supercomputer is etched, which is able to configure itself in order to intercept and direct light, which is how it is able to spy on us and pull light tricks. The problem is that it is nonsensical from the start. If you can unfold a proton around a planet in such a way that it blocks all light, it is being bombarded by far more energy than it would be in a particle accelerator. It's like using paper origami to bounce asteroids, basically the same issue as the Expanse, except worse, and that's before we even get into the supercomputer stuff.

Still, point taken. The Expanse should probably not be classified as hard sci-fi either.

By no means disparaging and I'm addicted to the Expanse currently (book 5) - There is _no_ explanation of the technology (protomolecule, drive system, gates) in the books up until yet? Gravity and the Coriolis effect get mentioned a lot, the concept of a rail gun gets some explanation. I would classify Expanse as space opera. There's a lot more science, say, in Andy Weir. I think Andy would have a very hard time explaining the protomolecule.

Humans in the universe don't know how the protomolecule or the gates work though

And we readers don't know how the Epstein drive works. Hence my conclusion: not hard scifi. The way the story is structured (each chapter a separate voice; most chapters a cliffhanger, like a tv series) and characters and crew are portrayed: space opera, with opera in the way of soap opera or telenovela (great word).

I was thinking about why these books gripped me, while usually I get tired quickly of space opera. For me, it's in the quality of the execution. Each book and each chapter gives you direct action via a predictable sequence, while the characters get a little more round each iteration.

It's a fusion drive

Totally agreed. It's a strange vibe because it feels like it wants to be hard SF, but it's really not. Maybe it's something about the translation?

It's very Asimov-like, in that the elements where the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions (or human/psychic, human/alien, human/robot, etc) handled in a very rationalist, almost mechanistic way.

And also like Asimov, there's super-science stuff (e.g. warp drives in Foundation, time travel in The End of Eternity) that isn't "explained" in any way, it's just part of the setting.

>the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions

During my reading, I thought this was the point. I'm not sure the stories were trying to be in any specific genre, maybe genre-adjacent at best, but the author wanted to focus on what happens to the human and humanity with all this advanced, arguably fantastic tech.

The story has some rather clear political biases that a lot of people don’t like, and I can’t help but think a lot of the criticism of the series comes from that. The most tyrannical human characters in the book impose their tyrannies for the sake of collectivism, and collectivist authoritarianism comes very close to dooming humanity more than once. I can imagine people who have collectivist political outlooks not liking it at all.

I don’t see anybody criticising those aspects, though. When people criticise the science or the plot or the characterisation, why not take them at their word?

Human interaction is terrible. All the characters are flat.

- "All the characters are flat."

Too soon...

Too good

I believe the OP means on a grander scale, not individuals.

Individuals in the series largely act as if their personalities have been hit by the dual vector foil.

But the series is rarely about the individuals. Instead its about exploring how humanity - and aliens - might react to the existence of one another.

In this regard I feel Liu created in the reader a vertigo-inducing sensation of depth.

I actually was thinking about the individuals, but you’re right, he talks about how societies behave too (and that’s more important for the overall themes of the novel).

I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, although it’s not entirely my cup of tea; my comparison to Asimov is meant as a compliment.

Better to have no explanation than a bogus one, which is what it would have to be for things that haven't been invented yet.

Sci-fi should focus on the social implications of hypothetical technologies.

Interesting. I didn't like The Expanse at all- I thought it read like it had been written from the offset with the intention of it being a Netflix show. It lost me early on, when a character beat up a load of enemies with her jiu jitsu.

Calling The Expanse "hard sci-fi", especially in comparison to the Three Body Problem, is quite rich.

I see this sentiment a lot and don't really understand it. Until the last few books there is a very clear distinction between the human tech (hard SF) and the alien tech (magic). The main story takes place very much within the limits of plausible physics (ships rely on reaction engines and takes weeks to traverse large distances, space combat and weapons are actually realistic, powered armor doesn't keep people safe from inertia, etc.), and then there are magical elements that the characters run up against.

Contrast that with Three Body where the main plot driver revolves around FTL communication with indestructible intelligent nano-scale machines that can be anywhere any time, then gets progressively less realistic from there. I did enjoy the thread about the human ships going extra-solar, though, which was closer to Expanse in terms of Hard SF meeting a magical element (+dimensional travel).

Yes!

What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it?

I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.

TBP is also very cavalier about basic interactions with energy. To make a sophon, I kid you not, the aliens unfold a proton into a 2D sheet that they wrap around their entire planet. The unfolded proton has the same mass as the folded one (explicitly stated), but far from being invisible, it actually blocks all incoming light from their sun. That's orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to shatter protons in particle accelerators, smashing into the sophon for days on end, and it just... holds together? And then it gets to Earth and can apparently move and fold and unfold on its own and intercept all of our communications (which should also shatter it).

>indestructible intelligent nano-scale machines that can be anywhere any time

They are not nano-scale, they are planet-scale, 11-dimensional computers projected into 3-dimensional space.

Yes, I know, and I hope you understand how that makes it even more magic instead of Hard SF.

Ironically, buried in a footnote at the end of the article is a reference to the only technology that will actually matter in the future:

"All images generated with Midjourney."

For those who enjoyed the trilogy, there is a fourth book "The Redemption of Time: A Three-Body Problem Novel" written by Baoshu [1]. Originally one of the first fanfics by the Chinese sci fi author. Later approved by Liu Cixin himself for publishing and translated into English by the same sci fi author Ken Liu who also translated the original trilogy. The book envisions the aftermath of the conflict between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42646354-the-redemption-...

Coming this year: https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-three-body-problem...

I'm disappointed by the slow progress in cryo-suspension. It seems like it should be possible, and would be very useful on earth too. You could just hop however many years into the future. It'd have fascinating social implications if people could do that.

The main problem is apparently that ice crystals grow and damage cell membranes. Surprising that that should be so unsolvable.

Why should it be possible? We weren't built for that. The stories about the bodies that have actually been frozen are horrifying. And I don't see the use, apart from personal curiosity.

But imagine yourself waking up, 200 years in the future (if anyone would be willing to thaw you): you're an old, penniless, and clueless body without papers, adding extra weight to a world that has its own problems. People will still be people, so you're not going to like it.

"We weren't built for it" isn't really an argument. There are so many counterexamples of things we weren't built for but are popular.

It lets you make a bet on the future being better. Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago be mightily impressed by today's level of technology and prosperity? The bet can go badly, of course. The world might get worse. But it's a reasonable bet to make if you believe in continued progress.

> Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago

That would have been 1823. No electricity, no cars, no running water, let alone computers and digital payment, and probably a pretty different dialect. He would be homeless. Imagine being someone like Rockefeller ending up between homeless immigrants and gangs. No matter how much progress society has made, that person wouldn't enjoy it.

My “favorite” part of the trilogy, is when a character in the book praises the writing and quality of a couple of fairytales that are part of the plot and written in the book

As in.. Cixin literally calling his own writing great and patting himself on the back

It's a plot point that these stories are well-liked. The stories themselves are objectively simplistic, but in the minds of the party to whom they are supposed to be good (trying to avoid spoilers here), it can make sense that they would like them. I didn't cynically read it as the author saying their own stories are so amazing.

I do think the embedded extra meanings are well-made. Whether it would actually work and remain undiscovered by the aforementioned party is a bit besides the point for me: the fact that the author made it work at all is nicely done. A lot of 'bad' writers show only reactions and never more than shards of the actual text to avoid having to make something that lives up to the claims.

You gotta admit, it's pretty funny though

And to your edit, I agree, the fairytales were a highlight of the book

In fact, Liu was found praising his own books in a forum using burner accounts after the publication, and also reminding people that the Hugo award the novel received was "huge in the Western sci-fi world". He was probably truly happy when Obama said he was a fan.

The characters in Tolkien's books really liked singing Tolkien's songs.

a brilliant series, scope is mind bogglingly vast. Liu Cixin is an engineer by trade as I understand, so the sci-fi is pretty 'hard', imo he was just trying to fit in a story to the end of the time in 3 volumes. Some adaptions coming up, hope they do it Game of Thrones level justice

Well the team leading the Netflix adaptation is led by the same two who led GoT, so that's likely the expectation from those funding the project.

Kind of cheap to quote from the first item in the article, but:

While it could cost $10+ billion to build [...] scientists believe that carbon nanotube material could be the answer.

Yeah, that's going to cost a lot more than $10 billion!

There's plenty of fun tech and mega-structures in this book but I don't think it has anything interesting to say about the plausibility of any of it.

Made me think of: "You're telling me Julius Caesar, who has been dead for well over 70 years, made this salad?"

I am a huge fan of the trilogy but it's because I accept it for what it is. Most of the characters are not that well written and do not have satisfying arcs; instead, they are merely there to push the plot in a certain direction at the required moment.

I also didn't think that the technologies got too fantastical until Death's End, where everybody inside the solar system as well as outside of it are experiencing new things every 25 pages or so.

I still think back to the trilogy as different events over the last few years. Looking back at the actions and habits some people started during the early weeks of the pandemic (washing groceries) feels a lot like humans at the end of the Dark Forest looked back at the early years of the Crisis Era - a lot of grasping at straws and trying to give the appearance of doing something. And it's very easy to see how people would turn against Escapism in the end.

The AI generated images were excellent. I love that the cost of such concept images has come way, way down.

Myeh, they're clearly AI-generated but that's not my complaint here - the absolute inconsistency in style and ultimate lack of 'overall style' or visual grammar's what bugs here. It may as well be a poorly-considered selection of clip art, from multiple disparate sources as used to be a problem back in the 90s.

It'll take a while for people to get used to considering graphic generation as more than mere visual placeholders, I suppose. Early days.

Yes, I struggled to get a semblant of similar styles between the pictures, despite the same suffixes or playing with 'remixes'.

Sometimes, adding one extra word to the prompt (even though it doesn't describe the style) will change the whole visual style or change the thing you're trying to highlight.

It was my first time with Midjourney, I'm sure there are tricks to improve on that. Might revisit the images, I do agree that the styling inconsistencies don't look too good.

As a 'sometime designer' who has dabbled in MJ quite a lot, I'd suggest taking the outputs and then running them through something like Photoshop and tweaking them in there to get them to somehow match a bit more - eg. you could add a texture, or halftone them, or alter the hue and saturation to standardise them a bit. Whilst MJ can texturise things, it does tend to fall over a bit when doing so.

Good luck!

Thank you! I did spent a substantial amount of time playing with prompts, variations and upscales to try and get decent results. The space elevator one for example, way harder than I thought.

Still not fully satisfied but good enough.

I'm pretty confident that it is intentionally not about the characters. People are so used to stories where specific characters are individual saviors of everyone else, but I don't think that is the purpose of the characters in this story. There just needs to be characters to help guide the story and have a lens to view the world through, but who they are and what they want is not the purpose of the book.

It's more about the collective response of humanity to situations and any individuals perspective is not that important.

This was one of the things that I actually really enjoyed about this series. I really don't think a book that is as grandiose as this where the entire world, solar system and universe are at stake can have an individual savior like a super man.

I thought this trilogy was full of fresh takes. For one thing, it’s written from a Chinese pov, so things like the cultural revolution and appeal of authoritarianism are big themes. Second, it’s full of dry humor. It’s hysterical when aliens’ super weapon doesn’t work, over and over again. Third, it toys with issues in the philosophy of science, like how how our view of reality can change because of long periods of comfort or difficulty, or just boredom too, even though reality hasn’t changed at all. I would read more of these if he wrote them.

Sidebar:

For anyone who liked it, and wants a related, a bit more "out there" story: The Redemption of Time is fan fiction, but the novel has been officially blessed by the author and published by the original publisher, and later by Tor in English.

It’s not quite on the level, writing wise, but quite close. This sequel takes place so many years in the future, that it’s buttery-soft sci-fi, though. I still enjoyed it.

Redemption of Time really disappointed me tbh. I'd much rather than the original author wrote more than rubber stamping this fan fic.

I think there are some good ideas in Redemption of Time (like what was the real cause of the Trisolaran cultural reflection) but the last third of it just goes off the rails

This trilogy is the first one that I read that is on the same level, or even better, than Asimov's novels.

Concepts and ideas here are much bigger, but there are so many cramped into every book that sometimes it feels like a Rick & Morty show. And I like that the point of technology is that no matter how advanced you are, there is always a bigger fish.

The only real "flaw" is that the dark forest theory hinges on the inability to communicate at superluminal speeds, and yet the novel has superluminal communication (siphons). But if you ignore all that, it is a brilliant piece of SF.

It still takes two civilizations the lightspeed time to establish superluminal comms, during which many things can change.

It only took the sophons 4 years to reach Earth, but there are many civilizations that are hundreds of light years apart. More than enough time to start the chain of suspicion

How would the ability to communicate at superluminal speeds invalidate it? Isn't the civilization who can achieve that even more dangerous?

The Dark Forest problem posits that in the time required to send a message to a distant civilisation, the sender could just as easily send something that would destroy the distant civilisation. Further, that it is not possible to know without communication whether a distant civilisation would have peaceful or belligerant intent. Therefore, any civilisation that knows the existence of another should pre-emptively destroy the other rather than risk waiting to find out if it is peaceful

If FTL communication is possible, it could be possible to establish the other civilisations intent before they could send anything destructive.

As for the Sophon's it might be that they require a compatible recipient to work and so first require matter to be sent to the distant location. It's a long time since I read the Three Body books, but I seem to remember them being based on quantum-entangled particles, which would fit with this.

You need to physically send a Sophon for it to enable FTL, so the first message is not faster than light.

Near the end I think future civilizations communicate via dimensional membranes or some magic-technology like that, but it doesn't reveals your position either.

Really loved this trilogy, sure there might be some inconsistencies here and there, but it's still pretty much hard sci-fi or borderline so and more importantly I don't know any other sci-fi books which are so intense like this one. Relentless twists, there is really little time to be bored.

I absolutely LOVED Liu Cixin's The Wandering Earth collection of short stories. One of my favorite Sci-Fi books. Surprised no one else mentioned it here yet.

>It's now one my favorite sci-fi books.

Same here, same here.

I liked it but found it meandered into dead-ends a bit too much.

The whole trilogy was a dead end. ;)

I extremely enjoyed the trilogy, was hesitant at first because I‘ve never read Chinese sci-fi. One thing I enjoyed reading about was the whole concept of the „Dark Forest“: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

Nice graphics, but the article misses what was the most interesting new (to me) idea in the books: the Droplets, which are made of "strong interaction" material so dense that miniscule amounts can destroy planets. I'd love to read more about this idea.

There are much more ideas, I.E. (Spoilers!) dimensional attacks, slow light-speed areas and their effects, math attacks, destruction of the fabric of spacetime, nano-scale multi-dimensional computers, whole universes trapped inside elemental particles, etc. There are so many interesting plots that each one could be an entire book on his own.

True! I missed this one. Will read a bit on it and add an edit.

The space elevator. Ah yes, famously introduced in Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest.

The space elevator has an unsolved problem of colliding with satellites in space, so even if we find a good material to build it, it won't work.

The space elevator was proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in Fountains of Paradise in 1979.

That said, I do love Cixin Liu's work even if I don't love his prose.

Worth noting, the sentence at the end of the article:

> All images generated with Midjourney.

Amazing.

I liked the illustrations on this post. Where are they from?

Liu Cixin manages to write a great sci-fi trilogy with an interesting global plot without pissing of the chines communist party - that's what I find really impressive.

SpaceX's Starship+Superheavy ("can+kicker", informally) promises $100/kg to orbit. (Musk is on record lying that it might be $20/kg.) So, the space elevator would need to do much better than $50/kg.

Anyway there are better alternatives than the space elevator that have the advantage of being, y'know, possible. The orbiting, rotating "skyhook" concept, that dips down to snatch a payload from the upper atmosphere and fling it to space, is one. A ring-shaped version, rolling, might be more structurally practical.

None of the ideas cited in the article originate from Liu. He riffs on them. What would make them more interesting would be knowing how to achieve them. But we don't. People are working on some of them. Some are just bad ideas, the Neptune one spectacularly so.

Thanks! Will add an edit mentioning your points on the elevator.

As for the Neptune idea, assuming 200+ years of technological progress in chemistry and physics, isn't there something that could be remotely viable about the idea? (Not fixating on Neptune in particular, but as in using materials from other planets.)

An advantage of alternatives to rockets would be that they do not contribute to destroying the ozone layer.

Restoring the ozone layer by dispersing ozone could be a useful idea, but all it requires of material is oxygen, which we have plenty of right here. Neptune has nothing extra we need. The sun turns oxygen into ozone by the gigaton, today. To really address the problem, you would need to remove the fluorine compounds that consume the ozone. Nobody seems to have a better idea than not to vent more.

The space elevator notion relies on discovering a material strong enough to build it of. Other schemes seem possible with existing materials.

Neptune has helium-3 that might someday be useful as fuel for aneutronic fusion, if we can get that to work. Hardly anybody is trying. Getting to Neptune and collecting it seems even harder than getting aneutronic fusion working.

It sounds like Skyhooks still need lots of rockets to reach the hook, just much less fuel needed to burn per trip.

> A skyhook differs from a geostationary orbit space elevator in that a skyhook would be much shorter and would not come in contact with the surface of the Earth. A skyhook would require a suborbital launch vehicle to reach its lower end, while a space elevator would not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)?oldformat=...

Almost all the fuel needed to reach orbit is used getting to 5 miles per second. Catching the skyhook needs none of that fuel, but only whatever is needed to get to altitude.

I.e., Blue Origin's pogo stick, or Virgin Atlantic's tour bus, would suffice. The requirements on such a vehicle are massively less than for an orbital launcher.

I was going to read his books, but then discovered he parrots Chinese government propaganda about the Uighur genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin#Political_views

This is not intended to be flame bait, but what else would you expect? He is a Chinese national writing within China. This is not an ex-pat safely secluded in a western country writing sci-fi and attempting to get it allowed back in China. Even if he is aware of the full scope of the CCP’s actions against the Uighur peoples I don’t see how you expect a published work in China to contain anything but the Party line.

He is just a guy writing fiction in a country which does not tolerate political dissension from established narratives. As soon as he had any success the ability for him to deviate from Party approved thought became smaller and smaller.

But, I do like siblings suggestion to buy and read the books used if you want to avoid financially supporting the publishing/advertising machine (both East and West) that is profiting off material that ignores and covers for tragedy.

Edit: I should have specified that I am talking like it’s just his written output, but I think my comment applies to his presence or appearances in media in any form (interview, reviews, promotion, etc) not just the actual stuff in his books.

Why should I believe that such statements don't represent his actual views? Why would I want to consume anything he writes then?

It's amazing the mental gymnastics people can go through to tolerate evil. Most people nowadays to think that if they were in a really fucked up situation like Nazi Germany or something they'd be one of the good guys, like they'd be helping Jews escape the country. But I don't think that's the case...

Why would you not want to read fiction written by someone with political opinions far from your own? Isn't the entire point of speculative fiction about getting exposed to ideas you would not have yourself?

Right, the question of whether genocide, concentration camps, and rape are ok is just a matter of "political opinion"

I don’t understand where this line of thought can act as a standard. If you are advocating that reading a book by a Chinese author, even one who supports his governments policy, is the tolerance of evil, if not actual evil based on the reference to the Holocaust, then where do you draw the line? I can almost be assured that whatever operating system you are using is funded, in some part, by actors who are perpetuating ‘evil’. Those companies doing business with China, the US military-industrial complex, or even just providing services to violent terrorist group are, by your standard, tolerant or in some cases actually supporting ‘evil’. Do you give up anything that is produced by those companies, including your OS?

There are a good number of plausible standards whereby calling out an individual for publicly defending a genocide is ok, even though, e.g., I feel like I have to buy things that are made in China despite my efforts to avoid doing so, and despite the fact that my efforts could be stronger.

To be clear, I don't think what you're saying is without merit, but I think you're drawing an inapposite comparison between more complex cases and a very clear one.

Just buy them second hand then and don't put money in his pocket.

Or don't.

He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books.

He has hypothetical future governments doing things arguably worse. Fiction is largely about fictional people doing bad things, or being forestalled trying them.

> He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books.

So? lol

"It's ok if he believes putting certain people in concentration camps is good so long as he doesn't mention that in his books"

We don't know what he believes. We only know he is obliged to say what keeps him out of a re-education camp.

What would you be saying, in his position? Be honest.

This is true, but only by omission: we don't know everything he believes. We do know he publicly supports the genocide in order to protect himself. MLK day is around the corner. It's worth considering what it cost some people to do the right thing, vs what some people got paid to support the wrong thing.

Let us consider what it cost MLK, and whether we demand that of everybody.

I favor applauding people for speaking out in risky circumstances. Condemning them for failing to risk what we need not is questionable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com