The Three Body Problem should be retitled. Here are some ideas:
- Nothin' But Plot Holes
- Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
- the Four Body Problem (since the trilsolarans don't actually live in a 3-body system
I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's so hackneyed and tropey. People call it hard sf, but it's the opposite.
For me, the interesting thing about TBP (I only read the first in the trilogy) was that it was attempting high-concept SF from a very different background: the Cultural Revolution.
High-concept is not the same as hard SF, it means that the novel is driven by the ideas it's trying to articulate rather than anything else. Hence the fragile plot and characters.
But the central question - is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? Are your views of reality being systematically manipulated to prevent you reaching certain conclusions and elevating yourself? Those are more interesting, especially coming from a writer under the CCP.
I couldn't bring myself to swallow his explanation for throttling scientific advancement. The trisolarans use a device that meddles with the results of particle experiments, to make the results super unexpected, so the scientists will commit suicide out of desperation. Make their experimental results so curious and interesting that the observers don't want to live anymore. To me that doesn't jibe with human nature one bit.
I also never really understood what the motivation was for projecting a countdown timer into that guy's optic nerve, other than a hackneyed Dan-Brown-level suspense device.
I wish I'd read this on paperback instead of e-book so I could flip back to some more of the "wait. what?"s and "?!"s I would have scribbled in the margins.
> is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level?
This was what was most interesting to me while reading the trilogy. The thought experiment of the 2-D society living on a paper target that is trying to predict where bullets will appear in their universe still sticks with me. I'd love to read anything else that explores the idea of the limits of science
For anyone interested, Stanislaw Lem touched on this same theme in his short story ‘The New Cosmogony’ that is included in his ‘A Perfect Vacuum’ collection.
The idea being that perhaps a sufficiently advanced alien entity could change the laws of physics in our corner of the universe, thus putting a sort physical speed limit on us and preventing us from probing outside of our own region of space.
What scifi are you reading that doesn't have plot holes?
Also, I don't think anything could be less flat than Liu's Chinese characters—especially the women like Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin. I suppose you might not have spent a lot of time with Chinese people, but you should know that due to their culture they live somewhat different emotional lives than Westerners, with much less emphasis placed on direct individual expression and much more focus on private or hidden (from family, society, etc.) actions.
Personally, I come to science fiction because I'm interested in seeing how human beings respond to the extreme situations in which imagined futures place them. In that regard, Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the most engaging and successful scifi series I have ever read.
People have different opinions. I think the label "hard sc-fi" is too fuzzy with everyone having their own expectations. Personally I found the books to be immensely entertaining. There's a number of very intriguing thought experiments.
What happens when a ship is sliced in half by an almost infinitely strong piece of string? What if people were able to enter and move around in 4-dimensional space, or if 3D space suddenly collapsed to 2D? What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?
Just like harry potter explores what happens if you have a cloak of deception or time turner. What would happen if Dementors invaded Hogwarts? Forgive me, I haven't actually read the whole series.
I've never heard a definition of hard SF that didn't require some effort to make the science part sound plausible. It's one thing to not hold up to the scrutiny of experts, but there were a number of times I looked up from TBP and thought "that sounds wrong".
If TBP is hard scifi than so is How To Train Your Dragon.
> What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?
I've not read the books, but I have read the synopsis, and when I read this bit I was somewhat surprised as there are so many things that break that new limit - would our electrical minds work at that speed? What would happen to electron orbitals? What happens to the stars orbiting the galaxy at ~200km/s ?
Hard sci-fi is No Real Scotsman: The Genre. The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science. At best you could call it fiction where technology figures heavily, like The Martian, which while great is hardly sci-fi at all in my opinion.
Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci.
Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.
> "The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science."
That's a really good insight, and I largely agree. I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future.
> "...but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP."
I strongly disagree. The alien powers were so unlikely and all-powerful that they may well have been called instead "Witch Demons from The Horror Dimension!"
You can add magic, but it should be grounded in some form of reality and be internally consistent. Hard SF is stuff that is theoretically possible but we just lack the tech for it, and especially how that might affect society. Cheap access to space is an easy example, thinking about a society with a working space elevator that enables people to live outside of traditional political systems. The similar story might be written about people stranded on an otherwise deserted island.
I'd say something like "For all mankind" also lands in the Sci-Fi genre, and there REALLY has been nothing physically impossible (yet), though the nuclear engine is borderline
It's hard to imagine "The Martian" or "For all mankind" to NOT be in the category of "science fiction"; they're certainly not fantasies. Maybe "For all mankind" belongs in "historical fiction" but it's edging towards being too recent for that. I don't think they're "just fiction" because grouping them in with, say "100 years of solitude" or "ulysses", or even "the client" doesn't seem quite right either.
> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before.
It's your opinion against thousands who read and like SF and loved Liu Cixin's books.
It's true that there you must accept a set of axioms that create a suspension of disbelief in most of those books.
"I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to..."
I must strongly disagree on your position that only people with specific histories may enjoy a specific book.
I think I recognize science (MSc in physics), my fiction (enjoy everything from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Banks, Clarke) and found the books as damn entertaining read.
It's fiction! If I want "real science" I will do a refresher on my quantum mechanics, CS algos or peruse the latest Economist.
Silly stories have their place, and some of us enjoy an entertaining yarn (if a yarn is 'entertaining' is then again a matter of taste).
I don't really disagree with your evidence but your conclusion is flawed.
The Three Body Problem seems like a very weird book by the standards of the 21st century but it would feel right at home amongst the "golden age" 50s and 60s sci-fi novels. It is a real throwback to the Big Idea! stories of that era.
I wrote longer reviews of all three novels [0] (to save you the click, I thought the first one was great, the second was OK, and the third actively bad!)
Reading your review, you call Xin an idiot, but I saw her as an alternative type of hero who rejects Luo Ji's effective but ultimately unsustainable and mutually-destructive masculinity. This felt very fresh to me.
I could not agree more. I don't mind hand wavy "technological breakthroughs" as long as the main point of the story is "when confronted with new crazy thing X, here's how humanity deals with it" and there's some clever thought put in. Maybe some interesting insights from the author. But the Three Body Problem.... ugh. So bad.
- As you say, the plot is terrible. Kerouac had a more coherent narrative. What story there was strained believability even for pulp sci fi.
- The characters are utterly devoid of humanity. I don't even know who's who half the time, and there is no continuity throughout the series.
- There are no clever "ah ha" moments where the author has thought of something "profound" in relation to the scenario they've crafted. It's tropes and painful lurches from one thing to another.
I don't get it. I finished it and I couldn't believe all the people telling me how great it was.
Have you read the sequels? I've read a lot of scifi both hard (Tau Zero, Blindsight, Diaspora, ...) and soft (Dune, Cat's Cradle, A fire upon the deep, ...) and whilst three body itself is middling, the second two books are masterpieces that make the overall series an absolute favourite of mine.
I read the TBP trilogy a few years back, and I can't stop thinking about The Dark Forest. That's one of the marks of a great book, IMO. I can't get it out of my head.
There's no way to tackle such an array of crazy concepts without being highly speculative and incurring in inconsistencies.
I guess you like better smaller plots, the author can make more consistent and believable.
To me, the way Liu links one after another crazy physics stuff into the book story is masterful. I've read most SF classics and there's nothing like that. That in itself is an accolade.
Heck, several times I had to browse Wikipedia to see whether the next mad stuff had any scientific background, to find most had.
I wouldn't call TBP "hard sf", its more like hard fantasy sf. It delivers on that pretty well - better than anything other series I have read. As for hackneyed and tropey, I can't think of another sf series that has this many original ideas presented in a way that's this compelling.
I liked the books. The sense of claustrophobia they conveyed was very well done, though I don't know if it was intentional. I also liked the exploration of China.
I don't really agree about the characters except for the ones of the third book. The third book feels a bit like a "history lesson through the eyes of this specific person".
I'm going to vehemently agree here, the books were incredibly over rated and presented as some sort of ascendant Chinese modern POV about a potential future.
The entire book feels like a cobbling of Cixin's fanciful "what if?", vaguely scifi moments (like the oft-cited wire cutting ship) hastily glued together with the most unrelatable and frankly forgettable characters I've ever read.
Go grab some Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, or Philip Dick.
This wasn't a terribly character-focused book, personally I find that to be a plus (since it's not usually the case in fiction). It remained interesting throughout. Having read plenty of sci-fi, you won't find anything that isn't tropey in some fashion. It's genre-fiction for a reason.
Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.
I enjoyed the first book, it was quite compelling. But the second and third really wandered off into a swamp. I wouldn't call it hard SF, but I don't really care about the designation, either.
I thought the characters in the first were well written. I lost track of who was who in the later ones.
The only character in the first book who exhibited any kind of personality was the gruff cop who swears, doesn't care if he's not allowed to smoke inside, and takes no shit from anyone. It's almost laughable how bad the author is at characterization.
I can’t even remember the characters’ names yet I still liked the books (the first two anyway). Not sure flat characters mattered for the story, it was still cool.
I wanted to like it, but I couldn't get through it. 50% of the way in, and almost no Sci, and no Fi, and god if I heard "dehydratory" one more time I was going to lose it. The "game" as described in the book was utterly absurd.
It could be because of a cultural mismatch between me (American) and the author, but there was a certain something that I just couldn't get past.
It effectively just means, "The science presented seemed plausible enough to me that it didn't distract or annoy me."
It's entirely personal since we all have different levels of fluency in science, and different levels of tolerance for the dissonance we feel when we read something we know is wrong.
LOL, agreed. I stopped reading when the novel finally got to "entanglement" as the entire explanation of how these light-years-distant aliens can see everything that happens on Earth.
Hold on, I didn't say it wasn't real sci-fi. I said it wasn't really "hard sf". As somebody else said, the definition of the genre is a little fuzzy. But in my experience the best hard SF doesn't handwave away inconsistencies, and uses our current understanding of science as a basis for the science in the story. Sophons are about as believable as dragons.
Stephen Baxter does a great job with hard sf, and much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work fits the bill.
Edit:
Oops I guess I did say that people who liked it hadn't read real SF. What I meant by that was that they were an exposed to a lot of the genre, because the "original" ideas in TBP I keep hearing people praise felt very familiar and tropey to me.
Not OP, but Greg Egan is mentioned somewhat often around here. Having read some of is books (Schild's Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora) I can firmly recommend them, and would assign them the "hard sci-fi" tag.
You can also never go wrong with Arthur C. Clarke. Another favourite of mine, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
If I want hard sci-fi I can read Lorentzian Wormholes from Matt Visser or something like that. You can't explore such crazy ideas from TBP without going off the rails with speculation.
> - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.
Not impressed by TBP, even though I enjoyed it with interest.
The 'Chinese Gorilla in the room coming out of the closet' phenomenon, the 'rising super power, we have to read it' effect, ya know.
'Oh look, its Chinese and shiny!'
Personally, I vastly prefer SF that collides with "reality", like Philip K. Dick's.
I didn't really enjoy the three body problem. While the science part was nice, the characters were just plain out boring and forgettable. In those aspects it's very similar to The Foundation trilogy. Didn't enjoy that one either.
From the interview:
> But now, many of the most famous male stars here embrace their feminine qualities.
I guess that interview was done before the current cultural purge started.
I didn't enjoy it much either, and also thought the characters were lifeless. Beyond that, it so read "weirdly" - it really felt like a direct translation from Chinese.
Well, Three Body Problem was written for a Chinese audience, by a Chinese author, so I suspect the characters would be more relatable to a Chinese audience.
This 1000%. I am a white American, but I read the book while living in China and working with Chinese people every day. The portrayals are not flat, they are spot-on. Many Western readers just don't realize there are other ways for a person to be besides the Western way.
The Foundation series is a fascinating thought experiment stretched over an extremely barebones story with some very 1-dimensional characters.
The recent TV adaptation is pretty interesting, though. It's more of a loose adaptation and I think they've done a good job with adding more dimension to some of the characters.
That's a pretty current view of Chinese national policy, actually, so it doesn't come as a surprise at all. From what I recall, Liu takes a party line; I believe he defended their treatment of Uyghurs in recent interviews, for example.
Yeah, the politics and concepts in Liu's writing is pretty typical of realist CCP/Chinese thinking. People will make excuses that everyone toes the party line if they're smart, which while true, also overlooks that common Chinese views (IMO) does substantively diverge from western views, especially in IR theory which influences overton window of policies etc. Liberalism is a luxury for Liu's generation.
I can't read the article because paywall, but Cixin Liu's three body problem trilogy had had a big impact on me. A big theme of the books is how we collectively process information and make decisions.
The world is threatened by an alien species and different people have different strategies for deference. They need to pick something that can't be predicted and defeated. Essentially earth needs a collective poker face while rapidly innovating a unique solution.
There is an implied parallel between human behavior and quantum particles. Our decisions are influenced by the information we have and signals from people and our surroundings. Quantum particle movement is influenced by the dynamic combination of forces on it. Both have probable outcomes from an observable state, but that observation influences the behavior of both.
I'm left thinking about the nature of reality. Some things are probable, and some seem random. When we see an option we like, we can nudge the situation towards it. When we don't like the options, we can take a walk or try something new and shake up the probability field we exist in to generate new options.
We can't predict the future because it depends on a series of interactions that have unpredictable outcomes. The three body problem explains how this is difficult to compute linearly. The best we can do is identify probabilities based on the information we have and our understanding of the model.
Quantum particles exist in a wave until they are observed in a specific point. When the wave function collapses, it goes from being probably here, to definitely there. I experience this in situations with dynamic outcomes. IE, I think this client is likely to sign today, but they may not. Sports plays are another good example. When we no longer have the ball in our frame of reference, it is probably somewhere in the direction we last saw it go. When it's in the goal, everyone sees it there.
It leads me to think about free will. We can go with the flow and give in to our influences. Or we can be decisive and do something else. The effects of our actions influence others in expected and unpredictable ways. I can have a great time being passive, just watching a movie or having a drink. I also enjoy being creative and taking risks. I get to experience the things other people contribute and share what I've found. I don't know what's out there beyond our understanding, but I've come to really appreciate the system we exist in.
Mr. Liu is like any accomplished writer, they are more often misread than correctly appreciated.
Even himself cannot see how vastly different between his own ideal and the reality in his writing.
For example, LIU proclaimed Arthur Clark as his role model. But his writing just has little resemblance of Clark's detailed subtle and mind grabbing magic. Liu's works always are presenting a grand idea, but presenting details from normal guys perspective. That makes it more of a Asimov writter. But his ideas are often more abstract than Asimov's, and make them closer to what Frank Herbert did in dune, but again, Herbert's work had much better dialogue and subtlety than LIU's.
And of course, because of the vastly different cultural background, most of the details are lost to western readers, making them, although still fluent thanks to the nice translation, througly bland in all aspects other than the high ideas.
I was expecting the "where it collides with reality" to be at least somewhat touch the nuclear war topic with 3 players.
Even the name of the trilogy is an allegory on the "three countries" — a historical novell any Chinese speaker will instantly recognise.
Now, we have similarly 3 nuclear superpower countries: Russia, USA, and China. The question he wanted to ask was "How will the three will act when it will come to press the big red button?"
Readit News
- Nothin' But Plot Holes
- Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
- the Four Body Problem (since the trilsolarans don't actually live in a 3-body system
I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before. It's so hackneyed and tropey. People call it hard sf, but it's the opposite.
High-concept is not the same as hard SF, it means that the novel is driven by the ideas it's trying to articulate rather than anything else. Hence the fragile plot and characters.
But the central question - is it possible the universe is lying to you on a fundamental level? Are your views of reality being systematically manipulated to prevent you reaching certain conclusions and elevating yourself? Those are more interesting, especially coming from a writer under the CCP.
I also never really understood what the motivation was for projecting a countdown timer into that guy's optic nerve, other than a hackneyed Dan-Brown-level suspense device.
I wish I'd read this on paperback instead of e-book so I could flip back to some more of the "wait. what?"s and "?!"s I would have scribbled in the margins.
This was what was most interesting to me while reading the trilogy. The thought experiment of the 2-D society living on a paper target that is trying to predict where bullets will appear in their universe still sticks with me. I'd love to read anything else that explores the idea of the limits of science
The idea being that perhaps a sufficiently advanced alien entity could change the laws of physics in our corner of the universe, thus putting a sort physical speed limit on us and preventing us from probing outside of our own region of space.
(The excerpts, general praise, and "dark forest theory" did not do it for me.)
I liked Terra Ignota in that regard.
I didn't get through the first two chapters of the TBP, but I loved all TI books.
Also, I don't think anything could be less flat than Liu's Chinese characters—especially the women like Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin. I suppose you might not have spent a lot of time with Chinese people, but you should know that due to their culture they live somewhat different emotional lives than Westerners, with much less emphasis placed on direct individual expression and much more focus on private or hidden (from family, society, etc.) actions.
Personally, I come to science fiction because I'm interested in seeing how human beings respond to the extreme situations in which imagined futures place them. In that regard, Remembrance of Earth's Past is one of the most engaging and successful scifi series I have ever read.
I can however recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan. Or Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. "Human" beings in "extreme situations", indeed.
What happens when a ship is sliced in half by an almost infinitely strong piece of string? What if people were able to enter and move around in 4-dimensional space, or if 3D space suddenly collapsed to 2D? What could happen if the speed of light dropped to 16km/s?
Just like harry potter explores what happens if you have a cloak of deception or time turner. What would happen if Dementors invaded Hogwarts? Forgive me, I haven't actually read the whole series.
I've never heard a definition of hard SF that didn't require some effort to make the science part sound plausible. It's one thing to not hold up to the scrutiny of experts, but there were a number of times I looked up from TBP and thought "that sounds wrong".
If TBP is hard scifi than so is How To Train Your Dragon.
I've not read the books, but I have read the synopsis, and when I read this bit I was somewhat surprised as there are so many things that break that new limit - would our electrical minds work at that speed? What would happen to electron orbitals? What happens to the stars orbiting the galaxy at ~200km/s ?
Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci.
Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.
That's a really good insight, and I largely agree. I think of successful hard sci-fi as "reasonably extrapolates what we currently know about science and technology into the future", but, as you pointed out, that leads to an unlikely, or worse, boring future.
> "...but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP."
I strongly disagree. The alien powers were so unlikely and all-powerful that they may well have been called instead "Witch Demons from The Horror Dimension!"
You can add magic, but it should be grounded in some form of reality and be internally consistent. Hard SF is stuff that is theoretically possible but we just lack the tech for it, and especially how that might affect society. Cheap access to space is an easy example, thinking about a society with a working space elevator that enables people to live outside of traditional political systems. The similar story might be written about people stranded on an otherwise deserted island.
I believe the hardest sci-fi is called "non-fiction". There is a "scale" for this, anyway:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien...
I'd say something like "For all mankind" also lands in the Sci-Fi genre, and there REALLY has been nothing physically impossible (yet), though the nuclear engine is borderline
It's hard to imagine "The Martian" or "For all mankind" to NOT be in the category of "science fiction"; they're certainly not fantasies. Maybe "For all mankind" belongs in "historical fiction" but it's edging towards being too recent for that. I don't think they're "just fiction" because grouping them in with, say "100 years of solitude" or "ulysses", or even "the client" doesn't seem quite right either.
I liked the books so I guess my vast collection of classical and modern SF is not real scotsman.
> I'm convinced that the only way to like that book is to have never read real SF before.
It's your opinion against thousands who read and like SF and loved Liu Cixin's books. It's true that there you must accept a set of axioms that create a suspension of disbelief in most of those books.
I thought what portion of the book I could stomach, sucked. Other people liked it. Both are fine.
I must strongly disagree on your position that only people with specific histories may enjoy a specific book.
I think I recognize science (MSc in physics), my fiction (enjoy everything from Chekhov and Tolstoy to Banks, Clarke) and found the books as damn entertaining read.
It's fiction! If I want "real science" I will do a refresher on my quantum mechanics, CS algos or peruse the latest Economist.
Silly stories have their place, and some of us enjoy an entertaining yarn (if a yarn is 'entertaining' is then again a matter of taste).
The Three Body Problem seems like a very weird book by the standards of the 21st century but it would feel right at home amongst the "golden age" 50s and 60s sci-fi novels. It is a real throwback to the Big Idea! stories of that era.
I wrote longer reviews of all three novels [0] (to save you the click, I thought the first one was great, the second was OK, and the third actively bad!)
[0] https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_prob...
- As you say, the plot is terrible. Kerouac had a more coherent narrative. What story there was strained believability even for pulp sci fi.
- The characters are utterly devoid of humanity. I don't even know who's who half the time, and there is no continuity throughout the series.
- There are no clever "ah ha" moments where the author has thought of something "profound" in relation to the scenario they've crafted. It's tropes and painful lurches from one thing to another.
I don't get it. I finished it and I couldn't believe all the people telling me how great it was.
I mean, in fairness, this is basically traditional in sci-fi; characterisation that wasn't terrible was a bit of a novelty until quite recently.
No, I hated the first one.
I guess you like better smaller plots, the author can make more consistent and believable.
To me, the way Liu links one after another crazy physics stuff into the book story is masterful. I've read most SF classics and there's nothing like that. That in itself is an accolade.
Heck, several times I had to browse Wikipedia to see whether the next mad stuff had any scientific background, to find most had.
I don't really agree about the characters except for the ones of the third book. The third book feels a bit like a "history lesson through the eyes of this specific person".
I don't really value the "hardness" of SF though.
The entire book feels like a cobbling of Cixin's fanciful "what if?", vaguely scifi moments (like the oft-cited wire cutting ship) hastily glued together with the most unrelatable and frankly forgettable characters I've ever read.
Go grab some Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, or Philip Dick.
Rationalizations for liking/disliking a book are for the birds, you either like it or you don't.
What do you consider real SF?
I thought the characters in the first were well written. I lost track of who was who in the later ones.
It could be because of a cultural mismatch between me (American) and the author, but there was a certain something that I just couldn't get past.
It effectively just means, "The science presented seemed plausible enough to me that it didn't distract or annoy me."
It's entirely personal since we all have different levels of fluency in science, and different levels of tolerance for the dissonance we feel when we read something we know is wrong.
Stephen Baxter does a great job with hard sf, and much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work fits the bill.
Edit:
Oops I guess I did say that people who liked it hadn't read real SF. What I meant by that was that they were an exposed to a lot of the genre, because the "original" ideas in TBP I keep hearing people praise felt very familiar and tropey to me.
You can also never go wrong with Arthur C. Clarke. Another favourite of mine, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
Be prepared for a wild ride.
> - Attack of the Flat, Interchangable Characters
Yeah, I agree with you, but I don't know yet if this is a cultural thing with Chinese literature that can't be translated to English or simply that Liu can't write good characters.
Dead Comment
Personally, I vastly prefer SF that collides with "reality", like Philip K. Dick's.
From the interview:
> But now, many of the most famous male stars here embrace their feminine qualities.
I guess that interview was done before the current cultural purge started.
Great ideas, plot-twists but characters and their arcs are sometimes boring sometimes bizarre.
Overall I would recommend it for his thought provoking ideas.
The recent TV adaptation is pretty interesting, though. It's more of a loose adaptation and I think they've done a good job with adding more dimension to some of the characters.
The price of publicly opposing Xi Jinping's policies is disappearing for a year or so then making a scripted subdued apology on CCTV.
Predicting the future is surprisingly hard.
The world is threatened by an alien species and different people have different strategies for deference. They need to pick something that can't be predicted and defeated. Essentially earth needs a collective poker face while rapidly innovating a unique solution.
There is an implied parallel between human behavior and quantum particles. Our decisions are influenced by the information we have and signals from people and our surroundings. Quantum particle movement is influenced by the dynamic combination of forces on it. Both have probable outcomes from an observable state, but that observation influences the behavior of both.
I'm left thinking about the nature of reality. Some things are probable, and some seem random. When we see an option we like, we can nudge the situation towards it. When we don't like the options, we can take a walk or try something new and shake up the probability field we exist in to generate new options.
We can't predict the future because it depends on a series of interactions that have unpredictable outcomes. The three body problem explains how this is difficult to compute linearly. The best we can do is identify probabilities based on the information we have and our understanding of the model.
Quantum particles exist in a wave until they are observed in a specific point. When the wave function collapses, it goes from being probably here, to definitely there. I experience this in situations with dynamic outcomes. IE, I think this client is likely to sign today, but they may not. Sports plays are another good example. When we no longer have the ball in our frame of reference, it is probably somewhere in the direction we last saw it go. When it's in the goal, everyone sees it there.
It leads me to think about free will. We can go with the flow and give in to our influences. Or we can be decisive and do something else. The effects of our actions influence others in expected and unpredictable ways. I can have a great time being passive, just watching a movie or having a drink. I also enjoy being creative and taking risks. I get to experience the things other people contribute and share what I've found. I don't know what's out there beyond our understanding, but I've come to really appreciate the system we exist in.
archive.is is your friend in these cases.
Even himself cannot see how vastly different between his own ideal and the reality in his writing.
For example, LIU proclaimed Arthur Clark as his role model. But his writing just has little resemblance of Clark's detailed subtle and mind grabbing magic. Liu's works always are presenting a grand idea, but presenting details from normal guys perspective. That makes it more of a Asimov writter. But his ideas are often more abstract than Asimov's, and make them closer to what Frank Herbert did in dune, but again, Herbert's work had much better dialogue and subtlety than LIU's.
And of course, because of the vastly different cultural background, most of the details are lost to western readers, making them, although still fluent thanks to the nice translation, througly bland in all aspects other than the high ideas.
Even the name of the trilogy is an allegory on the "three countries" — a historical novell any Chinese speaker will instantly recognise.
Now, we have similarly 3 nuclear superpower countries: Russia, USA, and China. The question he wanted to ask was "How will the three will act when it will come to press the big red button?"