Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdwr | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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