I want to offer a differing opinion. I found the writing terrible which is excused on account of being a translation. The alien parts are quite imaginative but the rest of the action was just too surreal to stomach. The characters are cartoonishly flat or maybe China is more alien to me than I can handle.
Although three-body trilogy is one of my most favourite sci-fi books, I think your criticism is valid. Even the Chinese version is kind of so-so in terms of character building.
That's not why this book is great though, it's a hard sci-fi, and its charm is in blending imagination with science in a way that seems very plausible. It blew my mind when I realize some parts of the story which I initially assumed to be imagination turned out to have been scientifically or at least theoretically proven.
Do you mind to elaborate which pays you though were imagination but were proverb? Are you referring to the sun amplification and the way sophons are made? Those are the parts I assume(d) to be BS. The sophon thing seemed so bullshitty that it required some effort on my part to not be pulled out of the story too much by it.
Loved the first book. I couldn't finish the second book. It had a different translator but maybe that was why it was hard to be interested in.
Also, it felt like a Russian novel in that we had to learn about what happened to your grandparents, their treatment during the counter revolution to understand what was happening to people in today's world. I found that not very persuasive in terms of character. Is that really the way people in China see the world? As an american, I do think I'm optimistic and don't want to think about how history affects people. But it does a good bit. But my forefathers were not tortured and brutalized in the same way the people in the story faced. My grandfather was in WW2, but since he came back and went to college, that made it easier for my father and me and hopefully for my son.
Maybe if I was African American, I might see things differently. They certainly suffered from brutal treatment making it harder for later generations to succeed.
But the novel itself, I wanted more character. Once I got the 3 body problem idea, I wanted to find out what happened in the second novel, but it was hard to be interested.
Being European with a grandfather who was one of the few German survivors in Stalingrad, having grown up with a view of my grandparents home that had a wall that looked different than the others because it had been hit by a bomb I have a hard time relating to your argument.
I do agree though that the characters and writing in general could have been stronger. That's unfortunately the trade off with hard sci-fi though. Have you read much other hard sci-fi?
You typically have to read hard sci-fi for the ideas because the writhing trends to be mediocre at best. Try reading the average story in Analog and you will see what I'm talking about
I keep seeing Three Body being called "hard sci-fi", and I can't understand why.
In my vocabulary, that term means scientifically plausible or at the very least not manifestly impossible. But core elements of Three Body are just that: impossible. Even without going into the bizarre dimensional unfolding of protons (which are not even fundamental particles) to nice 2D membranes on which circuits are etched using meson beams (...), the resulting sophons are then used to communicate instantaneously over interstellar distances, courtesy of quantum entanglement. And no, that's not how quantum entanglement works; you can't use it to transfer information at superluminal speeds.
The "science" in Three Body is at the level of Star Trek technobabble. It might sound sciency to laymen, but it is really just magic with a modern coat of paint.
The Foundation also had psychic powers, pocket-sized nuclear reactors, and people accurately predicting political events occurring hundreds of years in the future. Just because Clarke wrote it doesn't mean it's hard SF.
Does hard sci-fi change over time though? I'm not sure but I would imagine that pocket-sized nuclear reactors for instance were at one time plausible, if the story was written when that was a case is it hard sci-fi? Or does it cease to be hard sci-fi as our understanding of the universe changes?
You can handwave some sort of FTL communication based on undiscovered physics if you want, but if you do that you need to avoid trying to explain it in a way that violates current scientific understanding. For example, you can't just declare that it works because of quantum entanglement.
Hypothetically, would you extend this to say that if current scientific understanding changes then a book could transition out of "hard science fiction"? I'd have to say it's more about intent than reality. I've heard of Brandon Sanderson's novels described as "hard magic fantasy", because even though the magic is made up it's largely consistent with the established world.
I think it's reasonable to say whether it's "hard" as determined at the point of publication. If you're reading old hard sci-fi, it may include things that were consistent with the scientific understanding at the time it was written but which were subsequently found to be incorrect.
There are levels of hardness. The mark of hard SF is a small number of breaks from reality, used effectively. If you use a different break from reality every time, you might as well be writing fantasy.
It's been a long time since I read Foundation, but I'm pretty sure Asimov was too smart to explain how those "ultrawave relays" worked. As a reader I am therefore free to assume that they are based on future physics discoveries (maybe involving wormholes?). That's fine as long as there is no obvious contradiction of known physics.
The really hard way though is to do what Robert Forward did in "Flight of the Dragonfly [1]: it includes 30+ pages and 12 figures with technical details. He worked it all out at the level of a real mission proposal.
FTL is a big problem for hard sci fi. What we know about the physical world is amazing and beautiful, and it's hard to see novels butcher it by adding in FTL. On the other hand, without FTL the theme of every novel becomes "I travelled to another star and now everyone I know is dead", or the light-speed limit otherwise ends up dominating the plot and squeezing out everything else.
I agree with the assessment of the Three-Body Problem.
I was excited about the premise and I enjoyed some of the SF concepts, but really the "back-story" was IMO the interesting piece, whereas the present time "action" was quite bland. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend, but I agree the criticism is fair.
I've been assuming that a large portion of the people giving it such high marks read it in the original Chinese. The motivations of some of the characters also seems stilted, but that's the kind of thing I would breeze over if I was sufficiently "in to it".
thank you, i couldn't agree more. The entire first book was boring. People playing a contrived video game! which sounds boring! but they are strangely fascinated!
The very first chapter, introducing the characters during the cultural revolution, was good but the rest ... not so good.
Flat characters, unfortunately, are a regular feature of Chinese fiction, and not just sci-fi (though worse in sci-fi). In fact, most of the complaints about Three Body on this page (weird story structuring, awkward language, huge plot twists in the space of one or two sentences) are broadly applicable to contemporary Chinese fiction in general.
If anyone's interested in more Chinese sci-fi, Clarkesworld has been mentioned. I also produce a literary journal of Chinese fiction in translation, called Pathlight, and we did one issue based on sci-fi, with I think some really excellent stories in it. I wonder if posting a link to what is essentially my own product is frowned upon here... Well, hell with it. Here's the ebook if anyone's interested:
I think people are usually cool with it if there's full disclosure up front. Nobody wants to feel manipulated, but most folks on HN appreciate a timely plug when they see one.
Talking about the Three Body Series specifically, the sheer scope and the lucidity of the writing was pretty breathtaking. Cixin Liu is like a Chinese Arthur C. Clarke, his novels are just overflowing with ideas. Haven't read anything like it since Clarke or Asimov in Western Science Fiction, with the exception of Ted Chiang.
Hmm, comparing Liu to Clarke is fair, but I don't think it's so hard to find more recent western SF bristling with ideas, Iain Banks, for example. Liu does have a very different feel (the 'different perspective') other commenters have mentioned, which certainly makes it worth a read, in spite of the flatness of characters etc. Some of it may be down to the translator, I found Dark Forest to be much more fun, though some of that is developments in the plot, not just Ken Liu's translation, I'm sure.
I haven't read Banks in a long time admittedly, but as you point out there's just something different about Liu's voice that I don't think I've read for a long time. Take for example things like this
>"One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean".
There's some kind of "humanness" and scale to his writing that's really great. I think his characters are necessarily flat because his characters pretty much always are humanity looking outward, there's really no place for lots of individual development.
I found it awful. It took too long to get anywhere, and nothing happened when it did - most of the pages are spent on characters, but the characters aren't interesting. I don't get what people see in it.
Let me guess, the hero, by becoming individual has to be punished for his falling astray and breaking the rules of society and die lonely and hopeless. Cant have all those youngsters running wild and destabilize society with new things, no matter how destabilizing society standing for itself is already.
Is there chinese SciFi that brakes out of the cliche that most west exported chinese movies locked themselves into? (Hero as prime Exampel)
That's a bit cynical I think. I've read the first two of the Three Body problem series, and part of the delight is the way it highlights (by contrast) the various cultural assumptions made by the sci-fi authors I normally read (a weirdly large proportion of whom are Scottish). But comparison aside, it's a really good read.
Empires of the Deep[1] may break out of the cliche you speak of, but I haven't seen it (and it's unlikely any of us ever will). There was a superb story about the not-quite-making of this film on HN a few months ago[2]
Yup, as notahacker intuited, Charles Stross is another favourite author, whose back catalogue I am eagerly consuming now.
His Singularity Sky / Iron Sunrise are (opinion) great introductions to what the kids may call his 'hard science' fiction -- though I'm disappointed that there won't be a third (and disappointed in myself for misunderstanding a rather large plot construct throughout the entire second book).
Accelerando is superb -- a delightful discovery made via some HN comments ages back.
Its so easy, waving other opinions to the wind.Completely impossible, that somebody else might be right, in another partial part of the world.
Have you ever tried talked to someone from china? Not about them, but with them? Watched how they educate there children? There may be exceptions for the upper echelon, but for the lower tiers, the good old rules of enforcing conservative views and respect for the elders is still applying and valid.
This authoritarian attitude creeps into a lot of minds and from their into science, military and finally fiction. Not only in china, but in a lot of other places in the world.
There are minds and works who transcend that, i just ordered the three body problem, as it seems one of those. I do not deny the existance of those works.
I also dont claim the mindset that confuciusim propagates, to be superior or inferior, it is a adaption to a very long existing one-state organizing hierarchy, through good times and very bad times. I still think this mindset applied to non-reflective science fiction, will always result in rather boring tracts.
Zhang Yimou definitely has a type (which Hero conforms to), and his popularity means that he's almost synonymous with "Chinese export film", but I assume others have their own styles.
I really enjoyed The Three-Body Problem/The Dark Forest/Death's End and highly recommend them because of their unusual ideas.
It was also refreshing to read a book coming from totally different cultural mindset that goes after familiar sci-fi goals.
We all have biases and failures in our perspective, and it was interesting read a novel where the authors biases were so different from my own. Liu seemed bipolar in his treatment of women for example. Half the women presented felt vibrant (Ye Wenjie for example) while others, such as Luo Ji's perfect wife were fanfiction quality.
Overall, the ideas presented in The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest are thought-provoking enough to recommend these books. Death's End on the other hand, was mediocre but worth a read just to finish the series.
The City Trilogy ( https://www.amazon.com/Trilogy-Modern-Chinese-Literature-Tai... ) is my personal favorite Chinese/Taiwanese SF story. Some people I've recommended it to pass on it because of some of the translation issues[0], but if you read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and you've read a decent amount of translated work already[1], The City Trilogy is a work on that can be enjoyed on levels like Star Wars or Dune. (and I make that broad comparison intentionally)
[0]A couple of key word choices, most prominently galaxies instead of what should really be systems or planets. the translator made can really pop literal minded people out of the story, and I think that you have to have the mindset that the composition of language is better and more evocative in the original than the translation.
[1] I've found, totally anecdotally, that a few of my Christian friends who have spent a good chunk of their reading time reading translations are able to enjoy translated works better than those who have not. I've also found, again anecdotally, that few people like the first few translated works they read, and enjoy the later ones better.
Your point 0 is one of the reasons I struggle with reading foreign (currently - Russian) SF [0]. I feel like the original author's intent isn't coming through. I still enjoy "non-western" SF for the perspective it brings.
Imagine the epiphany striking us non-native English speakers when we realize at some point during teenagehood that almost all the Sci-Fi we've been reading thus far wasn't the author's actual words.
> [1] I've found, totally anecdotally, that a few of my Christian friends who have spent a good chunk of their reading time reading translations are able to enjoy translated works better than those who have not.
I don't mean to be overly PC or anything, but the word 'Christian' seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the sentence. Is it just a true characterisation that has no effect on their enjoyment, or do Christians somehow have more (or less) difficulty with translated works than non-Christians? (Or was it maybe a typo?)
Not a typo, just a poorly expressed thought. I'll attempt to re-express it here.
My thought is that reading translations is a skill that takes time to develop, and my Christian friends have spent a lot more time developing that skill, even if it's not a conscious development. When I've talked to people about books they have enjoyed, I've found that my Christian friends seem to find more enjoyment reading the translated works than my non-Christian friends do.
It does, and I appreciate the clarification. Do you know why your Christian friends have spent more time reading translations? Is it related to dmreedy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847680 )'s hypothesis about reading the Bible in translation?
Exactly. I do not personally know of anyone that fluently speaks the original languages (I know people that have taken classes in the languages, but even they rarely read the originals, sticking to translations).
I believe this was an allusion to most Christians' experiences with the Bible being compiled through several translations of Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Latin, depending on the version and books.
I know that it was one of my great delights in reading Borges when I realised that I trusted Andrew Hurley, and could feel confident reading anything that he had translated. (I've never read the original Spanish, so the best that I can say is that, if Hurley isn't faithfully representing the original, then at least I enjoy his representation.) Do you know any 'reliable', in this sense, translators of Chinese science fiction?
People say Ken Liu, who translated the 3 Body Problem into English, is very good because he is also an SF author, speaks Chinese natively, and works with the authors. I've been out of reading short SF or discovering new SF for about 5 years, so I don't have any other good recommendations. John Balcom, who translated the City Trilogy, has translated other literature, but very little SF, from what I have seen.
Ken Liu does an excellent job in translating. Not only he successfully convey the intention of the author but also makes the whole writing more beautiful and poetic.
Absolute travesty that the immense amateur translation scene wasn't mentioned in the article. Chinese web novels that are 1000+ chapters long, with around 2000 characters per chapter, are being actively translated by a growing translation community.
If you like flat characters and lot's of humor and adventure, you should check out /r/noveltranslations
The characters may seem flat, but that's just one perspective. I recently finished all three books and can attest that more nuanced, multi-dimensional characters do appear later in the series, though there are also even flatter ones as well, so perhaps it's a wash.
Highly recommend the audio book versions on Audible. Great narration.
I think it's cultural, not a matter of translation. Readers in the west will have less access to stereotypes and tropes that all authors rely on, to some extent.
Great timing. I literally just 2 hours ago finished reading Three Body Problem, a sci-fi book mentioned in the article. The description of sci-fi books, not as predictions about the future, but as allegories for the present, is dead on. As someone who virtually always reads western books by western authors, Three Body Problem was one of the best books I've read this year. It was gripping, suspenseful, intelligent, and most interestingly, offered a perspective of the world that differs dramatically from that found in western books.
I think a truly global literary scene, featuring writers, ideas and perspectives from all over the world, has the potential to usher in the next golden age of literature.
read it a year ago. now reading "dark forest" - sequel to 3-body. I agree, both are excellent books, but now "dramatically" different from western scifi
If you enjoy allegorical, non-Western sci-fi, I would highly recommend the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, two prolific brothers who collaborated on a wide range of largely science-fictional material during Soviet times. Most of their work was heavily censored for allegorical references to the contemporary Soviet society and ideology; unredacted English translations have been published over the past fifteen years or so with epilogues written by Boris covering the censorship process. I would recommend beginning with "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn," which I started with, although "Hard to be a God" and "Monday Begins on Saturday" are more strongly allegorical. I read their entire catalogue after reading a book review last year and becoming (mildly) obsessed.
> The description of sci-fi books, not as predictions about the future, but as allegories for the present, is dead on.
I just finished reading Three Body Problem today. Curiously, in the afterword for American readers, the author explicitly states that he doesn't write sci-fi to discuss present-day problems in disguise.
Am I the only one who was wholeheartedly underwhelmed by the Three Body Problem? I did get through it but I consider it a waste of my time. The only good part of the story was the mysterious count down timer.
Did anyone else not enjoy the actual writing in Three Body Problem? I enjoyed the book from a speculative science and "well this is different" perspective, but the writing style and plotting were very difficult to parse through.
"Show-not-tell" isn't much followed. Character development is light, to say the least. Most of the story takes place from the perspective of one of two characters, but then there's one incredibly jarring chapter where the author goes, "Oh by the way, I'm sharing a bunch of classified documents with the reader that neither character has ever seen." And apart from scenes with a single non-viewpoint character (the cop), most of the dialogue sounds more like a post-modern philosophy lecture than actual conversation between real people.
Some of this could just be cultural differences between Western and Chinese writing styles, or maybe things got lost in translation. I haven't read enough Chinese literature to say though. For those who have read more, would you say Three Body Problem is typical of modern Chinese writing, or Chinese science fiction?
man, while that approach has it merits, i sometimes bored to death and drowning in American ("Show-not-tell" is taught here a lot starting from beginning of K12 and it is taught like it it the _only_ way) novels'/stories' showing and showing and showing all these details with telling almost nothing. Even Stephenson's works - i can't get more than a few tens of the pages in one sitting even though i do like his work. Again, it isn't about _all_ American writing, mostly about modern :) I mean just look at Asimov's Foundation - 100% tell, no show. Well, may be it is a bit dry for that reason, 5% of show wouldn't hurt :) Yet it is an example that "Show-not-tell" is just a tool which has its limited domain and which should not be enforced like orthodoxy (as far as i see, be it arts, science, etc. - wherever/whenever orthodoxy appears the art or science disappears there)
Btw, i'm a Russian (and do love a lot of American writing, especially SF and for the reasons mentioned above mostly buy American modern short SF where tell/show ratio is usually higher because of the short form limitation i guess :)
You can also argue that if the theme is about something as expansive as the "dark forest" (no plot spoiler!), flat characters and telling-not-showing are not bad choices for writing style. The humankind can be as insignificant or dull for this context.
Book 3 is where it all comes together. Pretty insane!
I read the English translation and felt the writing ranged from adequate to tedious, and conveyed little beyond the literal meaning of the words. Certainly some was due to skill composing English, which I assume is due to the translator. But at times there were long, dull tangents, especially (IIRC) into personal histories of characters, that had no impact on the story. I started skipping paragraphs and pages, and it took an effort to reach the end. The Cultural Revolution scenes at the beginning, however, were powerful and left a deep impression.
After that, I picked up a book by Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize winning author from South Africa. What a relief and pleasure - both books used the same language but entirely differently, hers was crafted so beautifully and with so much more meaning in the same number of characters.
Tom Stoppard (whose embrace of serious science should make him HN's favorite playwright - for example, one famous play turns on the Second Law of Thermodynamics), describes the difference between the highly skilled and everyday writer in his play, The Real Thing:
HENRY [holding a cricket bat]: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel... (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this [hack script] and see how you get on. ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?’ ‘Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits ... ‘Ouch!’
> The Cultural Revolution scenes at the beginning, however, were powerful and left a deep impression
I guess they're put at the beginning in the English translation to achieve that "Here's a foreign culture" effect. The Chinese language edition orders the chapters differently, so that those first 3 chapters on the Cultural revolution come in the middle of chapter 9 when Wang Miao talks to the astrophysicist. The Chinese edition more clearly unfolds the events as they're found out by certain main characters.
The Jackie Chan movie "Who am I?" film was similarly butchered for Western audiences. The Asian edition has his character waking up with amnesia in Africa, and we spend the movie identifying with him as he finds out how he got there, via memories returning and clues. The American edition, however, begins by showing all the forgotten memories, taking away the mystery for the viewer.
> I guess they're put at the beginning in the English translation to achieve that "Here's a foreign culture" effect.
I wouldn't assume the motive, however. Perhaps they thought English-speaking audiences are much less familiar with the abuses of the Cultural Revolution and needed more context. Perhaps they thought the scenes wouldn't pass Chinese censors or would attract too much negative attention if those scenes were featured so prominently. Perhaps ...
I found it hard to get into, as well. I had this feeling of distance, like I was reading a parable that I'm unable to understand. Or like the writing style was too unfamiliar an jarring, yet perhaps entirely acceptable with acclimatization. I'm not sure I can say it wasn't a good book on these grounds, I've had similar issues with older literature from western cultures as well.
I am a chinese reader and the writing style of Cixin Liu in Chinese is just so-so. Not that terrible and is enough for science fiction but is not good.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadThat's not why this book is great though, it's a hard sci-fi, and its charm is in blending imagination with science in a way that seems very plausible. It blew my mind when I realize some parts of the story which I initially assumed to be imagination turned out to have been scientifically or at least theoretically proven.
Also, it felt like a Russian novel in that we had to learn about what happened to your grandparents, their treatment during the counter revolution to understand what was happening to people in today's world. I found that not very persuasive in terms of character. Is that really the way people in China see the world? As an american, I do think I'm optimistic and don't want to think about how history affects people. But it does a good bit. But my forefathers were not tortured and brutalized in the same way the people in the story faced. My grandfather was in WW2, but since he came back and went to college, that made it easier for my father and me and hopefully for my son.
Maybe if I was African American, I might see things differently. They certainly suffered from brutal treatment making it harder for later generations to succeed.
But the novel itself, I wanted more character. Once I got the 3 body problem idea, I wanted to find out what happened in the second novel, but it was hard to be interested.
I do agree though that the characters and writing in general could have been stronger. That's unfortunately the trade off with hard sci-fi though. Have you read much other hard sci-fi?
You typically have to read hard sci-fi for the ideas because the writhing trends to be mediocre at best. Try reading the average story in Analog and you will see what I'm talking about
In my vocabulary, that term means scientifically plausible or at the very least not manifestly impossible. But core elements of Three Body are just that: impossible. Even without going into the bizarre dimensional unfolding of protons (which are not even fundamental particles) to nice 2D membranes on which circuits are etched using meson beams (...), the resulting sophons are then used to communicate instantaneously over interstellar distances, courtesy of quantum entanglement. And no, that's not how quantum entanglement works; you can't use it to transfer information at superluminal speeds.
The "science" in Three Body is at the level of Star Trek technobabble. It might sound sciency to laymen, but it is really just magic with a modern coat of paint.
If Foundation isn't hard sci-fi anymore, what's left? Only books like The Martian that don't leave our solar system?
To tell the truth, I don't personally consider any SF Asimov wrote to be particularly "hard".
There are levels of hardness. The mark of hard SF is a small number of breaks from reality, used effectively. If you use a different break from reality every time, you might as well be writing fantasy.
The really hard way though is to do what Robert Forward did in "Flight of the Dragonfly [1]: it includes 30+ pages and 12 figures with technical details. He worked it all out at the level of a real mission proposal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld
I was excited about the premise and I enjoyed some of the SF concepts, but really the "back-story" was IMO the interesting piece, whereas the present time "action" was quite bland. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend, but I agree the criticism is fair.
The very first chapter, introducing the characters during the cultural revolution, was good but the rest ... not so good.
(retreats to Iain M Banks & Gene Wolfe)
If anyone's interested in more Chinese sci-fi, Clarkesworld has been mentioned. I also produce a literary journal of Chinese fiction in translation, called Pathlight, and we did one issue based on sci-fi, with I think some really excellent stories in it. I wonder if posting a link to what is essentially my own product is frowned upon here... Well, hell with it. Here's the ebook if anyone's interested:
https://www.amazon.com/Pathlight-Spring-2013-Alice-Xin-ebook...
>"One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean".
There's some kind of "humanness" and scale to his writing that's really great. I think his characters are necessarily flat because his characters pretty much always are humanity looking outward, there's really no place for lots of individual development.
For example, read most things by Asimov or Herbert. Although I enjoy good characterization, lots of sci-fi works fine without it.
Is there chinese SciFi that brakes out of the cliche that most west exported chinese movies locked themselves into? (Hero as prime Exampel)
Empires of the Deep[1] may break out of the cliche you speak of, but I haven't seen it (and it's unlikely any of us ever will). There was a superb story about the not-quite-making of this film on HN a few months ago[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empires_of_the_Deep [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766319
I also immediately thought of Ian MacDonald and Paul McAuley, but neither of them are actually Scottish
His Singularity Sky / Iron Sunrise are (opinion) great introductions to what the kids may call his 'hard science' fiction -- though I'm disappointed that there won't be a third (and disappointed in myself for misunderstanding a rather large plot construct throughout the entire second book).
Accelerando is superb -- a delightful discovery made via some HN comments ages back.
It's heavy on spoilers around the history / creation / plots of same, so if you're ever going to read the above, wait until then before reading this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-...
Have you ever tried talked to someone from china? Not about them, but with them? Watched how they educate there children? There may be exceptions for the upper echelon, but for the lower tiers, the good old rules of enforcing conservative views and respect for the elders is still applying and valid.
This authoritarian attitude creeps into a lot of minds and from their into science, military and finally fiction. Not only in china, but in a lot of other places in the world.
There are minds and works who transcend that, i just ordered the three body problem, as it seems one of those. I do not deny the existance of those works.
I also dont claim the mindset that confuciusim propagates, to be superior or inferior, it is a adaption to a very long existing one-state organizing hierarchy, through good times and very bad times. I still think this mindset applied to non-reflective science fiction, will always result in rather boring tracts.
If that logic makes me brainwashed, then be it.
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-There,-Their-and-They're
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It was also refreshing to read a book coming from totally different cultural mindset that goes after familiar sci-fi goals.
We all have biases and failures in our perspective, and it was interesting read a novel where the authors biases were so different from my own. Liu seemed bipolar in his treatment of women for example. Half the women presented felt vibrant (Ye Wenjie for example) while others, such as Luo Ji's perfect wife were fanfiction quality.
Overall, the ideas presented in The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest are thought-provoking enough to recommend these books. Death's End on the other hand, was mediocre but worth a read just to finish the series.
[0]A couple of key word choices, most prominently galaxies instead of what should really be systems or planets. the translator made can really pop literal minded people out of the story, and I think that you have to have the mindset that the composition of language is better and more evocative in the original than the translation.
[1] I've found, totally anecdotally, that a few of my Christian friends who have spent a good chunk of their reading time reading translations are able to enjoy translated works better than those who have not. I've also found, again anecdotally, that few people like the first few translated works they read, and enjoy the later ones better.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Tales-Century-Russian/dp/188...
I don't mean to be overly PC or anything, but the word 'Christian' seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the sentence. Is it just a true characterisation that has no effect on their enjoyment, or do Christians somehow have more (or less) difficulty with translated works than non-Christians? (Or was it maybe a typo?)
My thought is that reading translations is a skill that takes time to develop, and my Christian friends have spent a lot more time developing that skill, even if it's not a conscious development. When I've talked to people about books they have enjoyed, I've found that my Christian friends seem to find more enjoyment reading the translated works than my non-Christian friends do.
Maybe that makes more sense? Totally anecdotal.
It does, and I appreciate the clarification. Do you know why your Christian friends have spent more time reading translations? Is it related to dmreedy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847680 )'s hypothesis about reading the Bible in translation?
If you like flat characters and lot's of humor and adventure, you should check out /r/noveltranslations
Highly recommend the audio book versions on Audible. Great narration.
I think a truly global literary scene, featuring writers, ideas and perspectives from all over the world, has the potential to usher in the next golden age of literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem
For a decent sci-fi I'd recommend to check Stanislaw Lem, especially 'The Invincible' and 'The Futurological Congress'.
I just finished reading Three Body Problem today. Curiously, in the afterword for American readers, the author explicitly states that he doesn't write sci-fi to discuss present-day problems in disguise.
I Personally find big corporation baddies more believable and readable.
"Show-not-tell" isn't much followed. Character development is light, to say the least. Most of the story takes place from the perspective of one of two characters, but then there's one incredibly jarring chapter where the author goes, "Oh by the way, I'm sharing a bunch of classified documents with the reader that neither character has ever seen." And apart from scenes with a single non-viewpoint character (the cop), most of the dialogue sounds more like a post-modern philosophy lecture than actual conversation between real people.
Some of this could just be cultural differences between Western and Chinese writing styles, or maybe things got lost in translation. I haven't read enough Chinese literature to say though. For those who have read more, would you say Three Body Problem is typical of modern Chinese writing, or Chinese science fiction?
man, while that approach has it merits, i sometimes bored to death and drowning in American ("Show-not-tell" is taught here a lot starting from beginning of K12 and it is taught like it it the _only_ way) novels'/stories' showing and showing and showing all these details with telling almost nothing. Even Stephenson's works - i can't get more than a few tens of the pages in one sitting even though i do like his work. Again, it isn't about _all_ American writing, mostly about modern :) I mean just look at Asimov's Foundation - 100% tell, no show. Well, may be it is a bit dry for that reason, 5% of show wouldn't hurt :) Yet it is an example that "Show-not-tell" is just a tool which has its limited domain and which should not be enforced like orthodoxy (as far as i see, be it arts, science, etc. - wherever/whenever orthodoxy appears the art or science disappears there)
Btw, i'm a Russian (and do love a lot of American writing, especially SF and for the reasons mentioned above mostly buy American modern short SF where tell/show ratio is usually higher because of the short form limitation i guess :)
Would his works have been even better had he shown more and told less?
Book 3 is where it all comes together. Pretty insane!
After that, I picked up a book by Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Prize winning author from South Africa. What a relief and pleasure - both books used the same language but entirely differently, hers was crafted so beautifully and with so much more meaning in the same number of characters.
Tom Stoppard (whose embrace of serious science should make him HN's favorite playwright - for example, one famous play turns on the Second Law of Thermodynamics), describes the difference between the highly skilled and everyday writer in his play, The Real Thing:
HENRY [holding a cricket bat]: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel... (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this [hack script] and see how you get on. ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?’ ‘Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits ... ‘Ouch!’
I guess they're put at the beginning in the English translation to achieve that "Here's a foreign culture" effect. The Chinese language edition orders the chapters differently, so that those first 3 chapters on the Cultural revolution come in the middle of chapter 9 when Wang Miao talks to the astrophysicist. The Chinese edition more clearly unfolds the events as they're found out by certain main characters.
The Jackie Chan movie "Who am I?" film was similarly butchered for Western audiences. The Asian edition has his character waking up with amnesia in Africa, and we spend the movie identifying with him as he finds out how he got there, via memories returning and clues. The American edition, however, begins by showing all the forgotten memories, taking away the mystery for the viewer.
> I guess they're put at the beginning in the English translation to achieve that "Here's a foreign culture" effect.
I wouldn't assume the motive, however. Perhaps they thought English-speaking audiences are much less familiar with the abuses of the Cultural Revolution and needed more context. Perhaps they thought the scenes wouldn't pass Chinese censors or would attract too much negative attention if those scenes were featured so prominently. Perhaps ...
I stereotyped that to China being behind still scientifically. They don't yet culturally have a scientific mind.
But it was an OK read I thought.