Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019)

newyorker.com

72 pointsbookofjoe114 comments

I'm happy most of the comment section is discussing Liu Cixin's works instead of this article, but having made the mistake of reading said article I have a bit of a rant.

This journalist seems so intent on making everything political (from the beginning to the end of the article) that it reads like they have no interest in anything he's actually written. The author of this article never describes a single genuine question about his works that it honestly makes me a bit sick. So many quotes are taken so wildly out of context that they contain a few words placed awkwardly in the author's wall of text and opinion instead of representing genuine conversation.

One of my favorite parts: "Liu’s posture slackened slightly as we ate. The drinks had warmed him, and the heat of Sichuanese peppercorns seemed to stir him from his usual reticence. I decided to inch the conversation toward politics, a topic he prefers to avoid." The author reads as genuinely manipulative, and it was clear Cixin already stated he wasn't interested in discussing politics in the authors previous attempts... Maybe have some decency and respect?

Yea I can see this in the article as well. And anyone who has read the books can probably see this wasn't the authors real interest. I can see where someone with their pulse on international politics might read into Trisolaris vs Earth being some sort of a proxy for China vs USA. But my take is that the author was just writing about sci-fi ideas from their personal perspective in China. Chinese history, politics, and culture plays into how the plot unfolds. But it didn't feel to me like they're trying to say much about the international politics of the situation. Instead the plot marches ahead into speculative fiction steeped in some current-day theories about the universe. There's certainly a lot of dabbling in human emotions and conditions vs aliens who don't share those same ideals. But like "how does the USA respond vs China" is like an afterthought of the book, can't remember if that even really came up.

> I can see where someone with their pulse on international politics might read into Trisolaris vs Earth being some sort of a proxy for China vs USA.

Yeah. Viewing The Three-Body Problem merely as a metaphor for China-US relations shows a limited perspective, as the novel addresses the fates of civilizations across different solar systems and the fates of the living beings in the entire universe. In such grand scheme of things, China-US relation is really nothing

Fully agreed, those books are no metaphor but exploring sci-fi ideas.. and especially because at the beginning, it imo gives a pretty realistic inside perspective from inside China. One might question "realistic" but I mean it in a way that the author also stated in the interview, staying outside of politics and not burning any bridges. Just read a bit between the lines, and accept that it is fiction.

(I'm not sure why people always need to bolt on those interpretations, they are maybe eventually more true with Tolkien as he definitely took some experiences into his fantasy, but also believing him that there were not any allegoric intentions, just fantasy creation. You are always to some degree what made you...)

Yeah, I would agree. I think the author was trying to force a narrative too much (they were trying to compare Trisolarians coming to WHAT exactly?). To the counterpoint as well, I think much of 3-Body it was actual a motivational tale that humanity would set aside its differences and come together in times of crisis.

Weirdly, they seemed to understand that he wouldn't talk about politics out of self-preservation:

> When questioned about stories that seemed to allude to Stalinist conformism and paranoia, Lem said the same thing that Liu says about geopolitical interpretations of his trilogy—that he was not writing a veiled assessment of the present but merely making up stories.

(Spoilers) I think that the part about the guy who's brain traveled to the Trisolarians and communicated back by telling a fairy-tale may be a story about the author himself: He's also in an authoritarian regime and unable to tell things face value, so he communicated by telling a "fairy-tale" (SF in his case) full of metaphors which needs to be decoded by the reader first to get the real meaning.

Ok, maybe I'm reading to much into it, but if it was to obvious, Liu would get intro trouble, so plausible deniability is important. But I think that the books are much more political as many think. But you need to decipher it first...

Politics can add another layer to sci-fi.

For example "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is a great sci-fi on its own. But the background of McCarthyism and the red scare of its time makes it much cooler and much more entertaining and thought provoking.

I am slightly annoyed by Netflix's adaption of the book which takes the technocratic communist China out of it. I understand why it has to be like that but still we would have better TV if everything didn't have to be boiled in the same generic soup.

Definetly agree! Three Body has a lot of politics as an element, which makes it all the more interesting. I just didn't like the way the reporter tried to push their own narrative.

About the Netflix adaptation, I'd agree. I think by stripping away all of the positive angles of China from the book and only leaving the negatives (bloody cultural revolution), it lost a lot of meaning. IMO if you're gonna make every character intensely English-born, there's no reason to leave Ye Wenjie as Chinese. Perhaps her story could've been changed to something regarding residential schools or colonialism.

I just finished Deaths End this morning so I'm experiencing that ponderous glow that you get after reading something thought provoking.

Without going into spoilers, Death's End makes everything so... huge. It really made me feel tiny in our universe.

These are good books with some flaws. You should read them.

IMO it’s way more than “some flaws”. I bought into the hype and finally read the first book recently.

The plot, prose, the characters, literally everything except a couple of really neat sci-fi ideas is comically poor.

So bad that you start to wonder if you accidentally rented 2007’s Transmorphers at Blockbuster instead of Transformers.

The first book was not great. I particularly hated that stupid monofilament thing --- it's physically impossible for what should be obvious reasons.

The second book is much better, though, and the third is better still. If you've managed to work your way through the first, it's probably worth checking out the others.

They're nothing mind-blowing. But they're very competently written (unlike the first book, which was loaded with errors,) their scale is reminiscent of Stephen Baxter's grander works, and the trilogy is rather more accessible than a lot of Baxter's stuff.

> it's physically impossible for what should be obvious reasons.

In our universe, it is impossible.

In the universe of the book, if technology existed to unfold protons, those same protons could be woven into a long fibre, resulting in a material thinner and stronger than anything made from conventional atoms.

Regardless of whether this is a sound argument, it remains purely fictional. =)

I watched the Tencent show based on the immense praise here at HN and I agree. The characters especially, but even none of the major plot pieces had any actual bearing on the plot. If you replace the robots in "I, robot" you'd have a completely different work. If you replace the "three body system" in "three body" with an impending nova, or asteroid, or a billion other disasters you'd... still have essentially the same story. What was the point of the game (read: the game's had no real world purpose and was merely a plot device to convolute exposition)? Omnipotent handwavey magic alien technology what?

People here saying "well the second book is better"... should have qualified their praise for the first book a bit more because I'm rather disinclined to believe it.

The series gets better don't stop at the first book.

The first book is what, 500 pages? That's too much time to spend reading crap. I was ready to give up about a third of the way through but people told me it got better so I carried on (and I foolishly assumed there must be some reason it run the Hugo). It did not get better.

Just a day of reading, it passes by fast, I read the whole tetralogy in 4 days, 1 per book, really liked them

Just understand that not everyone skim reads 500 pages in a day.

500 pages for me take probably a month or so.

I definitely feel like the series gets worse as it goes on. The first book is incredible though, so it's hard to really go up from there. IMO the first book in that series deserves every bit of accolade it gets and then some.

FYI, the first half of the second book is very slow and somewhat cringe at times. You just have to plow through because the back-half of the second book + the third book are a wild ride that's totally worth it.

I'd agree that the second book has the highest cringe per page. The Luo Ji character was laughably bad.

It does not.

Even the "neat" sci-fi ideas are often complete nonsense, such as the whole concept of sophons, which leverage a neat fringe idea of theoretical physics while running afoul of boring, well-established physics.

Isn't that true for basically all speculative sci-fi? The point to the form is to pick an idea with "enough plausibility" and extend it to an interesting implication. Not all "sci-fi" can be (or should be) 2001 or The Martian; Foundation and Dune are kinda good books too.

To various extents, yes, but it is easier to suspend one's disbelief about certain things than others. The main issue with sophons is that they routinely have to interact with quantities of energy that should annihilate them: when they are unfolded, for instance, they have to bear the impact of light all over their planet-spanning surface. They are "god-tier" technology, but only because they flaunt basic conservation of energy. I find it harder to suspend my disbelief about that than e.g. faster than light travel.

Foundation and Dune's premises are much tamer, and neither story collapses entirely if they turn out to be false.

Ah yes, eating worm poop is the only thing that allows humans to navigate ships moving at light speed is more plausible.

Forget lightspeed: melding your body with worms give you first-person access to memories of your ancestors. Like, your ancestors who lived in Ancient Greece. And all others.

Sophon is downright mundane compared to this.

It is unironically more plausible than etching a supercomputer inside a proton, yes. It's odd, but it's not broken.

I like fantasy, and there's "believable fantasy" and "unbelievable fantasy". If you start saying the world has some unusual property X and then show the consequences of that, that's believable - maybe in the future there will be some technology, or physics, or whatever that show how a world with X could actually come to be, but it's the starting assumption of the work.

Dungeons and Dragons has magic, but it has a rule system, with some form of thermodynamics-y like stuff, internal consistency. Dune starts with some rules and largely doesn't violate them (and if it does, that makes it less kinda good).

> Foundation and Dune are kinda good books too.

Kind of?!

What's the well-established inner structure of an electron?

I'm not talking about the inner structure, I'm talking about the part where they unfold a proton in such a way that it envelops their entire planet and blocks all incoming light from their sun, meaning that it is continuously absorbing quadrillions of watts of power, although it still has the mass of a proton. It's grotesque, like bouncing off asteroids with gold leaf, but what's telling to me is that I don't think the author thought about it at all.

And then they send it off and control it remotely using quantum entanglement, except that entanglement, as far as we know, cannot be used to transmit information faster than light, let alone momentum. Furthermore, in order to be effective at anything, the sophon has to observe the world and transmit information back and forth, except that the capture and transmission of any nontrivial amount of information exceeds the mass energy of a proton by several orders of magnitude.

I couldn't agree with you more.

Yeah, I did enjoy the books, but the characters are not great and the prose pretty basic, the romances fall flat etc. But the more you go on the more interesting science fiction are brought up.

Overall I thought that these were some great and thought-provoking science function ideas wrapped up in an average to poor literary package.

> These are good books with some flaws. You should read them.

Counter view-point: These are bad books with a few thought provoking ideas that are never explored, left behind to explore a ridiculous plot full of nonsensical actions taken by paper cutout characters chasing a political goals that also make no sense.

Granted I didn't read the third book, but that's because I gave up not halfway through book 2. When I got to the end of book 1, I had no emotional attachment to any of the characters due to the poor writing, but some of the ideas were interesting, so I opened book 2. As it went on it became harder and harder to tolerate the incomprehensible motivations, stilted dialog, and the scope creep of the story, so I read the Wikipedia summary, and promptly realized I was right to stop reading the books.

Yes, the end makes you feel tiny, so tiny that it's impossible to connect the start of the books with the ending, plus the way it ends makes you feel like there was no point to anything to start with. In my opinion the only way it could have been worse was if it was all just a dream/snowglobe all along.

Nothing is ever resolved, just a few neat ideas sprinkled out with outrageous nonsense, and the stakes keep getting higher and higher until the universe itself is no longer big enough for the ending. I truly think they're bad books, I haven't read anything this bad since Atlas Shrugged.

That said, I'm glad that other people enjoy them, and I'm not trying to say people who enjoy them are wrong only that like all art, beauty is in the eye of the reader.

I think some of this is definetly due to lacking translation. The general consensus among fans is also that the first book is the least interesting, while the second and third become far better. IMO this is because the only role of the first book is a general setup with few Sci-Fi elements, of which all are hard!

I think your criticisms are legit. I think the books are love 'em or hate 'em.

Like you I never connected to any of the characters, but the direction of the story and its almost exponential growth in scale was what drew me in.

But c'mon, almost nothing is as bad as Atlus Shrugged (aside from maybe The Fountainhead). :-P

> But c'mon, almost nothing is as bad as Atlus Shrugged (aside from maybe The Fountainhead). :-P

I actually made it through The Fountainhead, but just couldn't make it to the end of Atlas Shrugged. I think The Fountainhead could actually be rescued as a story, but Atlas Shrugged is just a bad political manifesto with some narrative elements thrown in. :D

>scope creep

I think this is the fundamental point where people like you who didn't enjoy the books and people like me who deeply did depart. I thought the unfolding scope of the trilogy felt like a logical, justified progression, in the manner of an escalating conflict. Yes it does escalate quickly, but there is a good reason at each scope level that it needs to expand to the next as the conflict spirals out of control and the technology involved improves. And in general I enjoy when things sort of escalate in scope like that, like Akira for instance. Maybe you prefer books that stay at the same scope the entire time but that's a personal preference.

Also I really don't see how the nature of the ending is at all akin to the "it was all a dream" type ending, because it doesn't fundamentally undercut that the things that happened actually did happen, and had consequences. Yes our assumptions about the nature of the fabric of reality are undercut, but not in a way that means that anything that we thought happened didn't actually happen or anything like that, and not in a way that undercuts stakes, if anything the stakes are far greater. And the choice to restart the universe so it can be better again is actually a deeply consequential action with a lot of seeks to it. Likewise I don't see how the larger scope of the later books makes the smaller scope of the earlier ones not meaningful? That's how we got here.

And I think more than enough interesting and unique speculative fiction ideas are introduced, and I think they are explored enough, in a grand and stunning enough fashion, to justify the book, even if they aren't perhaps looked into as deeply as you think they should be, despite the paper thin characters with nonsensical motivations. Especially since the actual political chess/information game between the trisolarans and humans is so interesting.

I liked the books overall but I didn't really care for a lot of Death's End. Hard to get into why without spoilers, of course. But personally I felt that the quality of each book in the series was worse than the one before. That said, the first book was incredibly good so even if they get worse as they go the series is quite good overall.

I also finished Death's End this morning and have a similar afterglow re: scale (energy, space, time)!

The fourth book blessed by the original author is also great. Don’t sleep on that.

which one is that?

“The Redemption of Time”

It ties together loose ends and goes into more detail about what happened to that brain.

I didn't like the ending, but redemption of time gives a closure overall more to my liking

> makes everything so... huge. It really made me feel tiny in our universe.

I have to say... I kind of don't care for the exploding mind variety of sci-fi. I like good stories set in the future with some interesting technology and science that's not in our grasp yet, but still stories about people rather than 'wooooaaaahh' stuff.

Liu's trilogy absolutely centers around people, not technology.

I absolutely loved the whole series. I have never been as disappointed at a screen adaptation as I was at the netflix show. I couldn't get past episode 2. Terrible.

You haven't watched many Netflix adaptations! If the sensation of being banished from 10-dimensional cosmological heavens down into dead 3-dimensional purgatories could be meaningfully be experienced by humans, that ineffable tragedy, it would be the sensation of being forced to watch the Netflix flattening of a book you once dearly enjoyed.

"If the sensation of being banished from 10-dimensional cosmological heavens down into dead 3-dimensional purgatories..."

Ahem, spoilers. :-)

You made me laugh. I understand this reference as of about 14 hours ago.

One could argue that your TV screen is 2-dimensional.

Fully enjoyed both the books and Netflix adaptation. In fact I am surprised how well they made an entertaining tv series of this material that will appeal to a wide audience. My only criticism would be how fast they went through the story.

Same here, I've watched to episode 4 (the scene with the boat is in episode 5 and I just didn't want to watch that on a screen).

I can understand the desire to humanize the characters for the show, but the characters feel like a CW teen drama. I don't mind that they added some drama, but the drama they added was bad.

Maybe expectations were too high? I thought it followed book 1 pretty closely.

As book-movie translation go. I thought the choices they made in 3-Body were better than the tradeoffs in Dune 2.

But I liked Dune 2 as a movie, but leaving out the Spacing Guild, and how the Water of Life can poison Sand Worms, and they change to the Atomics. It changed entire dynamic on the stand off with Emperor. And leaving out Alia.

The only problem with 3-Body, is for season 1, they did stuff too much into it from Book 2, not that it was bad to do it, but maybe needed 1-2 more episodes, instead if felt rushed.

Huh, what were your complaints? I thought they did a pretty decent job - although I finished Death’s End in 2019 so it’s been a while. They preserved the most important parts in my mind, and otherwise the compromises seemed acceptable. I had low expectations and was pleasantly surprised.

The splitting of the main character (who was a humble middle aged Chinese scientist) into 4 pointlessly racially diverse beautiful young people who somehow represent the apex of the scientific community (and a snack company for some reason).

The total butchering of interesting concepts, for example the usage of the sun as an amplifier which, while based on some hand-wavey fictional science, was quite fleshed out in the book, turned into an utterly ridiculous scene where characters literally wrote out an equation on a blackboard that amounted to "a + b = c" (I'm not exaggerating) and you could practically see the mathematical symbols floating around their heads like that Zach Galifianakis meme.

But most of all it is the shit dialog. I don't remember the books trying to force sciency sounding words into every fucking line of dialogue. This show is determined to make very stupid people think "wow this is smart".

It's interesting that your primary criticism is that the scientists are too diverse...truly a struggle for me to see why that's such an abhorrent error

Personally I thought they did a good job at adapting a book that I thought would be nearly impossible to transform into a "pop" sci fi series.

That's not my primary criticism. I literally prefaced my primary criticism with "But most of all".

It's an "abhorrent error" because the themes of the books were deeply tied to the Chinese heritage and culture of the author and his characters.

I personally thought it was blindingly obvious that the show would be bad, to the point I haven't bothered watching. Not only are the books kinda hard to translate to TV, but the people in charge are the guys who did Game of Thrones. The train wreck that show turned into gave me no confidence that they could do a good job with an even more difficult adaptation.

I recommend watching the Tencent-produced Chinese adaptation, free on YouTube. It hewed very closely to the novel.

Watch the Tencent adaptation - like 30 episodes on just the first book (with subtitles). Really well done and faithful to the first novel.

Yes!

I was so excited for the show I went back and binge read all 3 books over the month of March. I really enjoyed them!

…I feel like the show is so convoluted and confusing (by design, I understand they’re trying to have this sense of mystery) that someone who hasn’t read the books would be totally lost.

I’m still watching, but I had higher hopes for it.

Try the 30-episode Chinese version: it's superb.

My friend and I had a hard time staying awake through the first episode. It was just incredibly slow.

Each to their own.

I don't think that the fact that you struggled to make it through the first episode says anything about the show though.

I suppose our votes cancel each other out.

I read the books and enjoyed them but there's a few dead-ends and the plot is a bit meandering.

I thought the TV series was great.

Every book ever has flaws

One thing I've noticed about Liu Cixin's books, is that for people who follow futurism and hard Sci-fi beyond the shallow level of a typical mainstream layperson, there are huge glaring plotholes. Here's perhaps the big one: Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into building space industrial infrastructure space colonies?

This also applies to The Wandering Earth.

In general, I get the feeling that the people who gush about all the awesome ideas in the 3BP books, are not people who read very much sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But those ideas have been explored previously, and much better (IMO), in other less popular books.

That's fair -- I read some here and there but I recognize that I'm not a hardcore sci-fi reader.

You mentioned that there are other, lesser known books that explore the same ideas in a more compelling way. Can you give some examples so I can add them to my reading list?

For an exploration of the dark forest theory at least, I recommend The Killing Star. Fair warning though, it’s extremely bleak.

I read it recently and while the ideas are there, it is not a great read (the dialogues in particular are pretty bad).

I won't argue the prose or characterization is great, but then that's extremely true of the 3BP as well. In every other sense I found the Killing Star to be a better book.

Can you give me your top 3 sci-fi books/series?

My favourite one so far was Broken Earth trilogy.

I'm looking for something new and really awesome but I'm not interested in a series with more than 3-4 books (as they rarely keep the same level of quality across the series).

If you're interested in series, I recommend the one beginning with Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. It's only two books, but it's a great space opera to dive into.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also good. I haven't read the sequel(s) but the first book can be treated as a standalone, and has some big ideas.

Finally, the Algebraist by Iain M. Banks remains one of my all-time favorites.

Do you have any non-space related books (non-series are ok)? Just curious :)

I'm not sure I know of any that are similar to the 3 Body Problem that don't involve space. But if you're just asking about SF in general...

Spin, which I mentioned above, takes place entirely on Earth. But it's definitely at least somewhat "space-related" in terms of its plot.

Caves of Steel by Asimov is a certified classic who-dunnit in a far-future underground New York City. If you're interested in golden age scifi at all, this is a great one to check out.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite books of all time. It has a tiny bit of space in it, but the whole book pretty much takes place on a single planet.

Permutation City by Greg Egan is all about computer-simulated consciousness. Thought-provoking but also a bit horrifying.

I also love Fine Structure by qntm (author of Lena[0]). Though it's a bit rough around the edges, I find that every time I pick it up to re-read it, I can't put it down until I'm done.

Those are just some ones I personally like. There's more I could list, but SF is a very wide genre and I have my biases — you should check out /r/printSF for some more broad recommendations maybe.

0: https://qntm.org/lena

Thank you so much, I'll explore those :)

> Finally, the Algebraist by Iain M. Banks remains one of my all-time favorites.

Funny. I have given up on the book after the first half since it bored me and I had to stop.

To each their own. I can understand that, since it is a pretty long book, and if you're not interested in the Dweller culture or the political background of the Hegemony (? — I think that's what the government is called) by the halfway point, you probably won't enjoy it. Have you tried any other Banks books?

> Have you tried any other Banks books?

I can't remember any, if so. Most likely I have 1-2 audio books.

The decisions made in Death's End in particular are very frustrating but I think the point was that humanity's biggest barrier to reaching the stars is itself.

> Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into [something else]

In most of these cases the outcome is "it makes a less entertaining story". The Anthropic Principle of Literature, if you will.

This needs a spoiler alert. The article unexpectedly gives away how humanity deals with the aliens in the second paragraph, revealing details you wouldn't know yet having only watched the Netflix show. Unfortunately I guess I took one for the team..

The books are very imaginative. Not always a fan of the prose, and the character development is lacking, but I think this is a great new take on the alien invasion genre that tries to put all of the current theories about extraterrestrials (or lack-thereof) into a very big plot.

Part of the draw of the first book is how much it talks about communist China from an insider perspective. I found those parts the most interesting by far, with some of the more interesting sci-fi ideas emerging toward the end. The next 2 books basically go down a speculative fiction path with the first book's ideas set in motion.

I always felt like the books were a fan fiction of certain blog posts I've read about the Fermi Paradox or the Great Filter. Any self-respecting sci-fi nerd needs to read them, and all 3 of the books. They probably won't wow you in the same way other award-winning authors have, but they should be thought-provoking.

Those aspects about communist China made it hard for me to get into. I read about 15 pages and gave up. Maybe it was also the writing style, or maybe it’s been too long since I’ve read a novel and it’s my fault for not having the patience.

I think I need to give it another try.

https://archive.ph/RRBLj

(2019)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20202063

Spoilers, LOL

A country should never take on another country who has more men of military age and which has far more manufacturing capacity.

That way lies destruction.

Just like Japan, while starting off WW2 with a more powerful military, couldn't maintain it's ascendancy over the US with its bigger industrial might and bigger population as the War in the Pacific progressed from 1942-1945, I fear that the US will not be able to maintain its power against a China that's four times bigger in population and maybe 10 times bigger in manufacturing capacity when War in the Pacific 2.0 begins in a couple of years.

If you think it's going to be US vs China, you're going to be absolutely wrong.

If it remains a cold war then it's about friction and who can last longer but if it becomes active, the world will split into 3 factions as WWII and the numbers will shift.

the world will split into 3 factions

One of those factions will be the West. Unfortunately for the West, the West is too small to be a major player and will be a big loser in WW3. Modern warfare is just arithmetic, and the West just doesn't have the numbers that stack up.

The whole of the West is smaller than just China by itself. Also China has far more manufacturing capacity than the whole of the West combined. The West is going to get its ass kicked big time.

If you put Russia and China together, you get something that has the huge raw material and energy resources of Russia plus the advanced technology of Russia plus the huge manufacturing capacity of China plus almost a quarter of the world's total population. A very hard combination to overcome.

If you throw into the "West" India and Southeast Asia, the numbers start to change.

A good pointer whether those countries will side with the West is whether those countries put sanctions on Russia when the Western countries did after February 2022.

The West has treated many countries badly, and yet still thinks those countries will side with it? Not likely at all. The chickens come home to roost.

As Napoleon/Rommel/whoever is reputed to say, "God is on the side of the big battalions."

> plus the advanced technology of Russia

Yeah, I see this advanced technology at play in the Ukraine at the moment....

So what’s your plan?

I don't have a plan.

I'll just have to take each day as it comes, though I am expecting lots of bad stuff to happen.

Because I'm old enough to have outlived a lot of my peers, I can accept that I won't be a survivor without too much angst, but I certainly won't be happy about it.

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