I’m a big science fiction fan so I thought I’d give it a go, it appears to be pretty critical of the Chinese cultural revolution. I don’t know much about Chinese politics/ history but I thought the government has pretty strict censorship laws, just interested if anyone knows the actual political stance of the book?
I found the technology so implausible that I was rolling my eyes in to the back of my head by the end of the first book and had no interest in reading the second. If you’re going to play that fast and loose with physics you might as well just write a fantasy novel.
Nah, it isn’t that implausible. The smaller dimentions being larger bit is a reasonable interpretation of string theory. The universe pollution part is a reasonable metaphor of earth so that checks out. The space macy stuff works like our navy where every slight advance in naval technology makes ships orders of magnitude mroe deadly to each other.
So yeah it doesn’t work well for hard sci-fi but it maps to near future stuff really well.
I’m glad I’m not alone. I don’t think it’s a bad novel as such. I read a lot of science fiction and I can see where it has ideas people might not have run in too if they’re not in the deep end of the genre. And I liked that it provided a different cultural perspective than the overwhelmingly white, male, and American science fiction that I grew up with. But I didn’t find the plot very compelling, largely because it relied so heavily on deus ex machina technologies.
Also, if you like that kind of Dark Forest/cosmic horror story Y’all should go read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s overwhelmingly the most horrifying, upsetting, and nihilism inducing science fiction novel I’ve ever read. It’s also a pretty snappy novella length and available free online. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Note that Blindsight isn’t particularly gory - there is some blood and violence but not that much. Instead the author’s premise and the philosophical questions that arise from it make you feel like an early hominid huddled as close as you can around a fire because it’s the only thing holding back the dark and the creatures that hunt you.
i finished the 1st and the 2nd was starting kinda slow so i gave up. should i not have?
Definitely. The 2nd book is my least favorite (but still quite good). It doesn’t have the central mystery pushing it forward like the first one did, nor does it have the things that the third book has going for it.
As far as the third book- I’ve never seen a book top itself so consistently. Every time you think you have a handle on what the rest of the book is going to be about, it turns out that’s actually what the next 10 pages are about, and the overall scope expands dramatically each time that happens. There’s some weird sexist shit in both that and the second book though.
