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?
he’s less brainwashed than his New Yorker interviewer for sure:
When I brought up the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs—around a million are now in reëducation camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang—he trotted out the familiar arguments of government-controlled media: “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty.” The answer duplicated government propaganda so exactly that I couldn’t help asking Liu if he ever thought he might have been brainwashed. “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
could this asian man have free tought? Imposible says the New Yorker journalist
I finished the book about a month ago and it reminds me a lot of mid-century Polish and Czech literature. I.e., a work that celebrates the idea of The Revolution in theory, but laments revolutionary violence as well as the fact that post-revolutionary society isn’t the utopia all the young idealists fought for, and ultimately concludes that actual change for the better may just be impossible.
The copy I got also includes a forward by Liu in which he talks about how we should love our fellow humans but be extremely wary, even hostile, to any extraterrestrial intelligences we find. Idk, it gives the whole book big Cold War vibes and makes me think he’s kind of a reactionary guy in his outlook on life and society. Or at least pessimistic.
Good story though. Characterization isn’t great, but the plot itself is really cool and very original.
My :bloomer: Posadist views really make me uneasy with the popularization of Dark Forest Theory. So I’ve not read the series, as it seems to be very set in that interpretation of interstellar relations. I’ve heard good things, but I don’t really want to read scifi that’s gonna joker-fy me further. I get enough :doomer: vibes from reality.
It’s extremely Dark Forest, and the entire plot is that a woman who was brutalized during the Cultural Revolution starts ringing a dinner bell in to space to attract a bunch of aliens who want to colonize Earth. The aliens do this using “technology” so utterly outlandish that it’s easier to call it a fantasy book than science fiction. The book is intensely xenophobic but accidentally admits that there is no plausible scenario where space colonization is feasible.
The dark forest is bullshit. It describes the world we live in now. A world where we would be just that threat to the universe. However we are also just that big a threat to ourselves. We would destroy ourselves if we don’t develop co-operation skills to go along with our power. We can assume that is a great filter for species in the universe. So the dark forest would self destruct
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.
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.
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.
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 started reading the first book and was digging it but then my life got hectic as hell and I quit about 2/3 of the way through. Plus the library loan was almost up.
But, I got a bit of an eyebrow raise over the one bit where they bring up the Aztecs and the horrors colonialism brought upon them, but then were like “yeah but the they committed human sacrifice so the blood shed was worth it to move their culture forward.” Granted the character in question was a member of the antagonist group so idk if that was an endorsement but…
Plus the library loan was almost up
If you got the dough, I suggest buying an ad-supported kindle and then jailbreaking it (see here for a starting point), wiping the ads thing from it, and then installing a way better reader: KOReader (which, among an absolute shitton of other advantages, supports epub). You make Bezos lose money, and you suddenly have access to the largest library in the history of our species: Libgen. Except you don’t even have to give the books back. Also, you can install apps on it (I have a terminal emulator with ssh + a chess game with a good AI on mine, for example).
I’m still on my first kindle I modded this way, and have been for like five years. They’re good hardware, and readability is good. I even bought two more along the years just as a backup for when mine breaks (which it never appears to do - I swear I dropped this thing at least 50 times).
Also, read the whole trilogy. It’s really good. And no, that weirdo aztec thing wasn’t an endorsement (at least I really don’t think so, having read the books more than once).
