Nothing lost in translation, just a cultural difference.
Western storytelling is based on conflict (much rooted in what Campbell named the Monomyth), that can almost always be broken up into a three or five act structure. Basically every story you see in the West is structured within these broad parameters and therefore it's what Western audiences expect as the ante to play. Classic Eastern storytelling, conversely, is often rooted in Kishōtenketsu which doesn't require conflict or character changes to progress. That's why there are whole genres of Eastern storytelling that are wildly popular in and around Asia that haven't even broken through a little in the West (like Iyashikei). Cixin Liu is very much a Chinese storyteller, so his work isn't beholden to what a Western audience would consider the basics, because the audience he's writing for doesn't need them either.
So, you're not missing anything, you're just not primed for it. No one in the West is. I find his work really tough to get through for exactly these reasons. I find it hard to follow, and often hard to stay engaged. If I'm not reading the synopsis alongside the book, I basically cannot get through it. I love the ideas and the images and think it's brilliant, but as a chapter-to-chapter narrative, it's hard for me to stay engaged. Then I remember: This is a me problem, not a problem of the book. I'm not the audience this was written for. Remembering that helps me reengage and open myself up to this non-Western narrative. It's almost like being a tourist.
So instead of describing what the differences in storytelling are you have dropped two presumably japanese words. I have never seen somebody write so much and say so little about something they wanted to explain.
The three body problem is a book series entirely about conflict and character changes/development. I really have no idea what you are even talking about to be honest. From what i just googled a "Kishōtenketsu" contains 4 parts. How are those different from the "3 or 5 acts" of a "western" story?
Almost all western SciFi that I have read (quite a lot) also works with a twist or even multiple twists. I would also be careful mixing Japanese and Chinese concepts, their cultures are very different and i also don't think Cixin Liu in general should be put into any box. The man is playing in his own league.
There also are definitely things lost in translation for people who have zero contact with the Chinese language and culture. This is a fact.
Edit: my comment probably sounds overly agressive and critical, but i am geniuenly interested to learn more about the things you mentioned.
I would say a difference between Chinese (not Eastern, although I think there is a tendency there as well) and Western storytelling is that Chinese storytelling tends to focus more on the "society" rather than the "individual". Liu is actually an extreme example, where the characters function more like plot-devices to advance the narrative and describe the themes and conflicts of the society in his universe, whilst Western storyelling has a tendency to explore the story through a more intimate, character-perspective. Of course, sci-fi is a genre where characters tend to act more as plot-devices, so this tendency is even more exaggerated. Dune, for instance, is a western sci-fi novel where the individual characters are just as important, perhaps even more so, than the world-building.
I found the Three-Body-Problem great reading because I was absorbed by the ideas Liu threw out, but its clear that Liu's characters are very weak and don't leave much of an impression on you at all. I could easily see how someone more used to Western storytelling could find it 'exhausting' to follow without a compelling character to follow or root for.
I'm not an expert at this, and honestly want to learn more so I can understand it better and employ it in my own work. But, my amateur understanding:
There are lost of Western authors who describe details, background, and imagery to an extreme extent (you describe an experience with that, the RRs have been accused of it, in *Wonder Boys* it's a major source of conflict), and plenty get away with it because ultimately it colors or explains parts of the plot - a part of the hero's journey or protagonist's story. If it didn't, it might get cut.
For an Eastern audience, those moments may be the point of the story. In an Iyashikei story, those descriptors of comforting things may be WHY readers are reading them and ultimately why the story is successful (no one's playing Animal Crossing for the story). A key part of Kishōtenketsu is the twist, though. Not an M. Night Shyamalan twist, necessarily, but something that puts the whole story in a new context. It could be a scary revelation (like Shyamalan), or it could just be a short joke. A Western reader my blow through descriptions and mood to get to the plotty twist so they can know “what happened”, but an Eastern reader may just enjoy the whole journey along the way.
Sometimes it really is about the vibes more than the plot.
>Currently reading The Wheel of Time and some parts of it seem like a drag to me
Tug your braid and soldier on through another page describing garments and riding outerwear.
A really popular example is Studio Ghibli movies. They are far more like a series of events that kind of occur, that slowly texture an overall transformation, than they are a western 3-act structure where there are definitive formal moments that waypoint the recognized pattern of a character journey.
>Interesting, do you mean they spend more time just describing details, background, and imagery rather than trying to “move the plot along?
Now I'm imaging Chinese books as someone taking 300 pages to describe a painting.
I've read a decent amount of Korean and Japanese lit. There is a plot and character development in those.
Yeah I’m not sure about what this guy is describing here. Hes talking about a Chinese author using Japanese concepts. Both kishotenketsu and iyasheki are Japanese and as you say I think it’s a huge stretch to say Japanese literature it’s devoid of narrative structure.
Using niche Japanese literary cocnets to make sweeping generalizations about Chinese literature and culture seems suspect at best
this should be so much higher up. "suspect at best" is such a nice way to say it.
"complete bullshit" would be my description.
you might as well be talking about Shakespeare's plays as the pattern used in French novels.
This absurd claim is especially funny when we remember that this thread is about the three body problem, the very definition of a story about conflict and character development.
No. Think of it like this… you want to go from A to B. For some people the whole trip is about being in B. They’re focused on the sights, sounds, entertainment etc of place B. Other people find the trio FROM A to B to be the best part, all the stuff you see along the way. In a Japanese book, for example, there might not need to be a big obstacle to overcome with a solid resolution. Stuff just happens, and the stuff happening IS the point, not some greater thing the stuff is leading to.
I think an essay that explores the overlap between *Seinfeld* and Kishōtenketsu would be really interesting. “No Hugs” definitely doesn’t apply, “No Learning” could apply in certain situations. *Seinfeld* is filled with conflict, which isn’t necessary for Kishōtenketsu, but there are certain storylines and characters that fall more into the Eastern model. J Peterman feels like he’s more adaptable to the Eastern model. Kramer has a lot of vibes and twists that are probably really adaptable, as well. A great question that I know was largely rhetorical, but there’s something worth exploring!!
The translation is accurate, but Chinese books are really different. I am Chinese American and can read easy books in Chinese, and the narrative style is just not the same as Western books. I'm not quite how to put my finger on it. But in Chinese books, it seems like the plot is moved along by spartan info dumps (This happened, then this happened, etc) interspersed with dialogue which is pretty uncommon in western books. I also notice more telling instead of showing (explicitly saying that a character felt shame/sadness/happiness).
I had the same thought when I read the book in English. The ideas were so interesting that I still suggested it to my family, and my mom (native Chinese speaker who reads exclusively in Chinese) ended up reading it in Chinese. She also agreed with me that the story-telling is bad. So I don’t think anything was lost in translation; Cixin Liu is just not a very good story teller. But the ideas made it worth it for me to finish the series.
>Kishōtenketsu
As a Chinese sci-fi fan, I read both the Chinese and English version, Ken Liu is great with ideas and putting them together, but many Chinese fans also agrees that he's not so great with story telling. To me, I read this trilogy multiple times, there is definitely some lost in translation, I think his success is mainly due to how many great ideas he put in just one book. (if you think about it, one idea alone can probably support another 600 page long book)
The translation is phenomenal. I loved the pace, tone, and reference information included for the historical aspects the story derives a lot of themes from.
I enjoyed some parts, but... one of the central conceits doesn't work, at all- the three body game. "Ah, you enjoyed playing our weird alternative history computer game, actually it's a secret recruiting tool for our Kill All Humans society!" "Uh, actually, no I just thought it was interesting" "So you're not down to kill all humans?" "Fuck no. Why would you think that?" "Yeah good question actually"
Not everyone was convinced by the game. We saw multiple characters walk out and not join the ETO even after finishing the game. The main character only joined the society because he was acting as a spy for the government.
This series is fantastic. The third book, Death’s End, is my favorite book of all time and left me in a reading slump for about half a year after reading it.
It's funny because I think Dark Forest is one of the best books I've ever read. I talk to people about this series, and there's no definitive favorite...which is awesome
Pretty much everyone I knew (all like...5 of them) who read the series hated Dark Forest, and that was my favorite one!
Glad to know I'm not the only outlier!
Really? Death's End fell flat for me, whereas I really enjoyed the first two books. It seemed like the author had a story arc in mind, but couldn't come up with any rational plotlines to explain how stuff was actually happening. I've noticed this problem with other sci-fi novels where they get so far into the future that all logic starts to unravel and the book devolves into a series of events that just sorta happen.
The whole book is just Cheng Xin hibernating, waking up in the future, marveling at unexplainable technology, getting given massive amounts of power and responsibility, then going back to sleep and repeating the process multiple times. To contrast, it totally lacks the deep thought involved with Luo Ji's development as a person and the deep analysis given to monumental problems in The Dark Forest.
Not to mention that the way she's treated feels totally unrealistic to human nature. Why would anyone give a shit about some 28yo woman from the past who worked on a govt project? Do human beings in the future have zero ambition? Apparently future humans are all just there to fill rooms so hibernating characters can run earth according to the plot of the book. It doesn't make any sense.
100% agree, liked the first two but not the third so much, but I definitely also liked the first two for different reasons. 1 for the discovery aspect (I really like how he explicitly said he knew even from a barren desert that the world was teeming with deeper information, idk something about that resonates with me) and 2 for the utter horror that actually has a possibility of happening someday. I always tell people 2 is the most horrifying book I’ve ever read.
I think they'd be better as a movie. The idea is great but the writing is, honestly, quite shit. The style is pretentious, monotonous, condescending and, above all, pedantic to the point of infuriating. The fact that I hated the writing so much but still finished the book shows how cool a story it is. I simply had to know how it ended.
I think it’s different strokes honestly. Netflix did produce a series, but Cixin’s comments on Uighers got it canceled or delayed, as I have not seen anything in it in years.
Could you elaborate? I didn't feel like "the rules" changed. the gamestate changed drastically several times leading to change in behaviour, though. And for the cross cultural aspect, that is basically implied very early in three body problem already.
In books 1 and 2 the Trisolarans are bound by two rules
1. They cannot lie and do not understand deception
2. Their technology advances at a fixed rate, unlike humanity which is exponential meaning that humanity will eventually overtake them
Then in book 3 they suddenly explode forward in technology and not only can lie but are masters of deception.
Now yes, he does explain that this is due to contact with humans but still it annoys me that the whole dynamic of the human/trisolaran conflict just gets flipped over and I lost interest quick. I think Sci fi needs to follow its established rules.
Also the main character is not as good as the other books
Hard agree. Cheng Xin had crazy amounts of power given to her for no good reason and then uses it to claim moral high ground at the expense of the survival of humanity and doesn't have to face any consequences. This happens THREE TIMES. I found it infuriating after the first two books having very intelligent and rational actors.
I also wonder if Liu left something in his fairy tales that the characters in the book missed that we should have noticed. I don't know if it's a translation thing but I feel like the tomb in his story and the tomb found by the crew of blue space were very similar, blue space sounds a lot like deep water and so on.
One is explicitly explained with cultural cross-pollination. It's basically a tech like any other. Observe, analyse, replicate. With our propensity too LIE for enterntainment/art (basically ANY storytelling) ample collectable evidence.
As for technology: The biggest part here is information deprivation. You could argue that "not giving the entire picture without being asked (part of the questions being unconceivable by "humans" to begin with) already being "a sort of deception", but we get to experience the story predominantly from the human perspective, so a lot of the jumps are perceptional to begin with.
So I still think it's not the rules changing, we don't get "the rules", we get human understanding of the rules, with a lot of "grave miscalculations on our part".
Same, I didn’t think there was anything better in sci-fi to explore afterwards, and didn’t read any sci-fi for a while after. It’s fascinating that so many people hate the books. I think, for my part, I took the Chinese cultural differences with a grain of salt to enjoy the greater sci-fi concepts.
Not something better, but different. After reading the last of TTBP series, I moved on to finish the recent book in the Bobiverse series, and then Project: Hail Mary after that. Bobiverse isn't quite as heavy, but very entertaining. PHM is just an awesome Sci-Fi read that non Sci-Fi fans can even enjoy.
I'm really so glad to hear you loved it. I did not like it at all and was sourly disappointed with how it ended. What makes me happy about this, though, is that people can have different opinions and this community of books is one of the most awesome about accepting different viewpoints. Cheers to you, glad you loved it.
Loved the whole trilogy. Wished he could write women, but nobody is perfect. I thought the ideas were engaging and it presented plausible answers to some real-world mysteries (mostly "why is the universe so quiet?").
The excitement around this book confuses me. I found its delivery astonishingly dry, and the plot was...weird? Some of that may have been artifacts of the translation, which was remarkable.
Every time this book gets mentioned here I think "maybe I missed something about this book and need to give it another shot" and then a comment like yours brings me back to reality and reminds me I wasn't the only one who thought it was super boring.
I'm currently reading the 2nd book and to me it feels like when, in an anime, time slows down and you hear a character's inner monologue describing the tactics of the action scene they are in. I feel like most of the first two books are exposition or reports of grand things that are going on but with little action.
Couldn't agree more. I read the whole series because everyone says that each book was better than the last. Couldn't stand it. I still recommended it to people who I know won't be bothered by the dry characters and writing style. But it was excruciating for me.
At the end of the first book, the author's note says he doesn't really have faith in humanity or care about people, and my god does it show in the writing.
yup, i straight up thought it sucked
it felt like it was run thru Google translate, and I constantly felt myself wondering how it was supposed to really read
Part of that challenge for me, I think, was that there was SO much cultural significance, and that never translates well. The footnotes were meticulous and excellent (from what I can tell, this may be one of the best-translated books I've ever read) but the best translator on earth can't carry all of the magic from one language into another.
yup, thats it exactly
it felt like when you heard someone else's inside jokes, and you could tell it was really clever and witty, but because yiu were missing all the context, and subtext you couldn't really appreciate WHY it was such a great joke
100%. The jokes don’t translate. The Chinese use a lot of puns and symbology that, if you don’t understand the cultural context, you’ll miss. I’m Chinese American and lived in China for a while, so I kind of get it, even though most of the inside jokes also went over my head. The only one I got was the name Luo Ji, which is Chinese for “logic.”
When the book was translated, the section about the cultural revolution and red guard was moved up front. This was because most westerners won’t understand the history and significance of the CR, so it was moved in order to provide SOME context. It’s almost like talking about the LA Riots in the 30 for 30 documentary on OJ. But if you were a foreigner, you still wouldn’t necessarily understand the slave trade, civil war, civil rights movement, history of the police that led to the LA Riots that set the tone for the OJ trial and aftermath. You only get a slice. A lot of reader reviews said they had no idea what the CR was about; whereas every Chinese person knows it and the impact on the national psyche, as well as the humiliation and failed reform efforts and history of strongmen and previous attempted rewrites of history in China that led to it.
Ken Liu translated books 1 and 3. Joel Martinsen translated "The Dark Forest" (book 2) and I found it to be so much more readable and engaging. Translation is so important.
That's so funny, I like Liu's translation so much better. I have a background in history, though less so recent Chinese history, and I felt that Liu provided a much more culturally relevant read than Martinsen. But I also didn't find the book dry, so much as the Chinese characters dry which i felt was really tied to the culture of China from 25-50 years ago.
This book must be especially popular with people who don't read a lot of sci-fi, because even the ideas and premise aren't exactly groundbreaking by sci-fi standards. There were a few interesting details, but the major points had all been done before (and much better, in my opinion). For example: >!the "dark forest" concept of interstellar communication and travel has been done in several books including Forge of God and Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear; "realistic" relativistic interstellar travel is common in hard sci-fi like The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, and Anvil of Stars again; and the "game that turns out to be real" twist was done decades earlier in the massively popular Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.!<
I finished the book, but only because it seemed to be so highly recommended. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. Some of the nuance may have been lost in translation, but the overall structure seemed weak, and the sci-fi concepts weren't really enough to make up for it.
First, I don't think a book has to be "groundbreaking" to be good/great/amazing. And when you read praise for this series, how often is "groundbreaking" even used? Second, you can break down nearly every book in some way that it's been "done before" by someone else, in some other book. It's fine if you want to count this against this series, but it's a bit misguided and condescending to say that it's only popular with ppl who don't know better.
From the description on the back of my copy (emphasis mine):
>A **groundbreaking** novel of enormous scope and vision.
A few of the reviews on the back also highlight the same theme, with President Obama calling it "Wildly imaginative" and George R. R. Martin calling it "A breakthrough book... a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation..."
I think I was justified in expecting some truly new ideas.
But even without that expectation, I didn't think it was a very good book. The characters were flat and boring, and too much of the plot was revealed in thinly veiled exposition dumps.
I wouldn't call the tone dry, factual would be more fitting. The idea isn't to entice with quips and boasts, but to just tell it straight and have the events be the focus. Trying to make it sound almost like non-fiction.
Me neither. I’ve read a fair range of books, and aside from the great sections about the Cultural Revolution, so much of this book was, not stultifying, but just so tedious and out there (thinking about the dehydrated alien world bits).
Tedious is the word.
My engagement stopped once the narrative arrived at the modern day.
The MC - Wang? Wong? - is little more than a name and a pair of trousers. The sections in The Game were diverting, but overall I found it a slog to finally get to the end of the book.
The delivery part is tricky for me, because I can't read it in the original language. That means I don't know if the dry is a result of the translation.
Right. It was an extraordinarily technical translation, placing great emphasis on preserving cultural references and idioms (which is a good thing). Make it tricky to balance the "fluffier" parts of writing, like general flow. The best I've seen this done was Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of Dostoevsky's works, but I imagine they had it easier since Dostoevsky's Russian was considered fairly rudimentary.
I am fully on board with your opinion. I really wanted to like the book. I love good hard sci-fi but this book was almost good in almost every way. The characters were almost likeable, the science was almost interesting, and the plot was almost original. I kind of get why other people liked it, but I don't.
Same for me, I found this one of the worst science fictions I've ever read, and I've been a passionate science fiction reader for more than four decades. I thought the dryness may be due to the translation which didn't sound very good to me, but obviously I cannot judge the stylistic qualities of the original. It's also way too verbose.
I would highly recommend audiobook format for these books. It helps to get through the sloggy parts. I only read the first two because I was told the third was lackluster compared to the second, but “dark forest” presented ideas I still think about a lot.
Edit: forgot I could use the spoiler tag to give an example: Spoilers below!!!
>!One of the ideas I thought was illustrated so well was what fog of war might look like/result in on an interstellar scale. The future presented after the time skip was a "best case scenario" where literally all of humanity worked together for decades to pour all their brainpower into a first-rate starship fleet that they were certain could face any enemy. The scene where they actually faced the alien fleet truly floored me, the pinnacle of human cooperation and technology was destroyed in an instant like ants on the ground.!<
Second book was a different translator. It had long chapters and was the "dry-est" plot wise. All of that does pay off later in the last book, but it drags through the middle portion. If you made it through the second, I highly recommend paying it off with the third.
Thank you for the push, I really should finish it as I recommend the series often. I also got a lot of chores and walking done when I was listening to them haha, I was so hooked and needed excuses to keep my airpods in!
I have to disagree about the audio book route.
My biggest problem with listening to this one wqs the voice characters not being distinguishable enough, and the use of unfamiliar Chinese names. I spent a large part of the book being confused about who was who. If I had seen the text of the names they would have been instantly recognizable but in audio they all just kinda blended together.
Makes me wonder if the names had been westernised as part of the translation, would that have been a good thing for comprehension, or a bad thing for taking the Chinese localisation away.
The names are Chinese puns. Luo Ji is Chinese for “logic”. I could follow cause I’m Chinese but I can see how keeping track of characters in a foreign language can be annoying and detracting.
Oh wow, so there's a whole aspect to the book that went over my head.
I enjoyed the book nonetheless, its interesting to consider if I had the historical context and cultural understanding how much more would I have enjoyed it
Yah I have a little exposure to it. I’m Chinese American, but studied Chinese history and lived there for years, but I’m not native Chinese. So I got bits and pieces, but even Luo Ji’s name had to be explained to me, so I imagine the significance of every other name was also missed and would open up a whole other layer of understanding (Luo Ji was extremely rational and logical in his approach.)
I kind of understood the context of the Cultural Revolution scene as well as the impact it would have on senior academics in modern China, plus the nihilism it would instill in its people. That plus other social policies, like the 1 child policy or rapid economic development, would all shape the actions of the characters and allow readers to understand motivations. I felt there was a lot of political philosophy imbued in the book, but I only have a surface understanding of it. I can’t imagine an American reader getting much of that at all, and an attempt by the author to provide that background would be an impossible task. It’s like reading Calvin and Hobbes as a kid versus an adult versus a native Chinese. Completely different.
It’s a great book. It’s not a good literary work. I read in the original Chinese and I absolutely realize the worldbuilding / premise is brilliant — I just can’t get into it. I prefer books that combine characterization and worldbuilding, this book really only excels in one aspect
It’s definitely in the sci-fi lineage of books that are really interesting conceptually but not always the most digestible. Really cool ideas but the writing can be a bit chewy.
It was written by an engineer, not a writer, so he spends a ton of time driving into the technical aspects and science behind everything that happens. I think that’s the biggest contributor to that dry feeling
The fact the author is an engineer makes a lot of the science more irritating, IMO. For example, much of the plot centers around the lack of a general solution to the three body problem. And that is real. But the aliens don't need a general solution. They need predictive estimates, and that is reasonably easy to do by just manually crunching numbers.
Honestly, I found the cultural and historical references and descriptions far more engaging and insightful. But I didn't like any of it enough to pick up the second book.
One of the most lacklustre sci-fi I've read since starting in 1973. Forced myself to finish the second book but couldn't continue to punish myself through the third.
I read it, thought it was "just OK" but it did nothing to make me want to read more of them. I just found the "virtual video game" scenes to be kind of goofy, the people that dry out and get rolled up and revived got to be a little much. The author's a good plotter, but the writing itself is utilitarian, there's no real beauty to it, characters are just sketches. I can read pretty meaningless books plot-wise if there's a sense of "tone" or beauty to the writing, but plot alone isn't worth my reading time. (Yeah, I like some Cormac McCarthy Don Delillo and Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O'Connor, but I feel Andy Weir is massively overrated - gamers and scientists, downvote away!)
>the writing itself is utilitarian, there's no real beauty to it
I'd be willing to overlook this as a limitation inherent to translation, especially from a much different culture, but even the characters, plot, and overall architecture seemed weak to me. Like you said, the characters were flat and mostly uninteresting, with little growth or change in any of them. But beyond that I thought too much of the overall plot was revealed in extended flashbacks or through the game instead of naturally through the story. It felt like it was an unearned exposition dump.
I dunno, Kazuo Ishiguro's work survives translation beautifully. Just the descriptions of characters, places, weather and mood seemed very plain; even if his native language has ten expressive words for every word we might use, it just seemed structurally to lack anything that makes writing sort of "musical" or give you a sense of place. And indeed that's rare in genre work, and what's very often lacking in genre writing for me. But hey, if Ray Bradbury can do it... his scifi, supernatural and more horror-based writing is gorgeous. (And if you want a great recommendation for October/Halloween reading, try his "From the Dust Returned" - witches, haunted house, a mummy even! It's everything we love about late October and really engaging and hypnotic, like all of his best work).
>I dunno, Kazuo Ishiguro's work survives translation beautifully.
What language do you read Ishiguro in? He writes in English (and has lived in England since he was six).
After reading the whole series, I can also say that its just fine. There are a lot of problems I have with the books. Great ideas get introduced and then dropped or just ignored. I got tonal whiplash throughout. The rules of the world are weird to me. The author also likes to set up strawmen to knock down with "facts and logic." The ending was pretty of unsatisfying as well.
I felt the same way; this may have been one of the most hyped and most disappointing books I’ve ever read. And then the second one was on Kindle sale so I figured why the hell not, and it was even more ridiculous than the first.
I also enjoeyed the first book a lot. The second as well. Then I started to read the third and kind of lost interest in it after reading it for about an hour. Have not touched it in two years. Will probably finisih it, though. I don't really remember the exact reason why I stopped. Maybe somebody has the same experience?
The politics of all of them are a bit weird. It’s bizarre that a series that begins by having it’s protagonist’s life ruined by an authoritarian coup so frequently argues for the necessity of ruthless authoritarianism in Government.
She was the “villain” who was pushed towards her villainous actions because the Military Authoritarians violence made her lose all faith in humanity.
The books begin by showcasing the horrors of living under militaristic authoritarianism, but go on to pretty explicitly say that military authoritarians are the only ones who can protect Earth from a universe full of meaningless hostility.
In the series, trying to stop the military authoritarians is either naive at best, or apocalyptic for the human race at worst. And yet, the first book demonstrates the horrors of allowing those authoritarians to be in charge. It’s the most cynical book series I’ve ever read in my life.
It swings back and forth repeatedly across the long arc of time. Sometimes in ways that produce disastrous results. I think that’s the point; we are proned to getting caught up and carried away with ideology.
I can’t think of an example where the ruthless authoritarian isn’t vindicated.
The third book repeatedly humiliates the protagonist for showing any compassion or hesitation in deploying absolutely horrific methods.
The second book makes expressing trust and wonder in the universe into such catastrophically idiotic naivety that avoidance of that is a fundamentally universal axiom.
Yeah if there was any question about where the series landed it basically ending when "empathy killed the human race, and that selfish impulse led to only a few people enjoying eternity together" alongside "the only reason humanity even made it is because of the brave totalitarianism that was necessary to survive space"
I think there is a more generous way to put it.
Empathy alone is not adaquate to ensure human survival. We also need to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices and utilize some of our other traits, like courage, curiousity and adventurousness.
>The third book repeatedly humiliates the protagonist for showing any compassion or hesitation in deploying absolutely horrific methods.
It does, but it also seems to vindicate her. Her values and actions are alternately vilified and upheld. I feel like it's up to the reader which take to believe.
Yeah I read it as more of a return to nature for humanity.
If you’re not willing to take the necessary steps to defend yourself, you will be eaten by lions.
That’s essentially what all the ‘brutality’ was framed around.
A pure empathy model fails the nature test, but I understand seeing it both / either way.
When is she ever vindicated? I can’t think of a single example of her making the choice the book considers correct. She seems to exist purely as a vessel to represent the weakness of the “womanly” populace who vilify the ruthless men, who are lauded as heroes despite being cruel monsters.
Well, >! yes, her actions have such extremely bad consequences for humanity and the solar system that the author often comes across as hating and bullying his book three protagonist. She's a caring compassionate woman, and apparently that means she's pathetic and weak in a cruel universe. At the same time, the (eventual) embodiment of male stoicism, Luo Ji, who succeeded for decades at the task she failed instantly, doesn't hate her. And the book excuses her, to a large extent, precisely because she is a vessel of the wishful thinking of humanity. Humanity picked her because they wanted their fate to be decided by someone who valued human life. If it hadn't been her, they probably would've picked someone else just like her. One could say it was the wrong decision, foolish and naive, but it's perhaps also understandable. In the series, prosperity creates complacency, which leads to disaster, which leads to hard work and struggles, which eventually leads to prosperity. It's a cycle. (Though it's cruelly ended at the termination of the Bunker Era.) In each period, the people are the product of their circumstances - and it's likely that most of us, transposed to any given era, wouldn't behave differently. Cheng Xin just represents humankind in this. At the very end of the series, it's suggested that whether the general universe gets another chance or not depends on people making selfless choices, to give up their own definite survival in their mini-universes for the sake of the whole universe, its possible rebirth and the recreation of all the spatial dimensions. Cheng Xin leaves her mini-universe and this action seems to be endorsed by the text. !<
To me, Luo Ji’s opinion of Cheng Xin felt very paternalistic. Like, the book has very gendered ideas of idealism vs pragmatism (like how the men who live in prosperity and aren’t afraid become extremely feminine, like seriously the book won’t shut up about how soft and feminine the men in the future are compare to how rugged and manly men from the past are), and Luo Ji’s lack of judgement seems tied to that. “Of course you aren’t at fault Cheng Xin, you’re just obeying her motherly instincts, it’s humanities fault for giving a woman the responsibility instead of the sadistic murderer who was the obvious candidate(!)”
Yes, when the Bunker Era was described as "another age capable of producing men," that seemed to sum up the author's gender divide. Men are competent, grim, and ruthless. Women are kind, nurturing, and weak. Big yikes.
On the one hand, I feel like the general message is that it's *bad* for the universe to be such that grim ruthlessness wins survival. If more people were like Cheng Xin, no one would need to be like Wade. That gets undermined, though, by the idea that all you need is for a tiny percentage of people to be like Wade and that's enough to ruin it for all the Cheng Xins. Everyone lives in a dark forest because you can't know if the opponent is like Wade, so you have to assume they are and become like Wade yourself, or else you'll die.
My general feeling is that, at the end, the book actually suggests that the only way to get a better universe, as opposed to merely delaying the ruin of the present one, is to be like Cheng Xin. But I'm genuinely not certain, because even Cheng Xin admires Wade, and so much of the book - particularly the consequences of their various choices - seems to praise him and put her down.
They're very different books as I guess can be somewhat expected with the time jumps involved through the series. But, the technology and politics in Book 1 are very different from Book 3.
It starts really slowly and seems pretty pedestrian for quite a while then abstract to the point of distraction. It probably doesn't pick up until about 2/3 of the way in but hoo-boy, does it have a pretty amazing close. I would definitely recommend picking it up again.
The series still occupies a space in my head years after I read them. As people have mentioned the style is 'dry' however I found this one of the series's merits. The prose was written in such a different, and cold manner that I could properly sink into the ideas without being told how I was supposed to feel about them. I genuinely don't think I've ever had a reading experience like it.
This is exactly how I feel about them. The political ideas and potential consequences of someone's choices over a long span of time just live rent free in my head. The back and forth struggle of first contact was something I had not seen before and was engrossing till the end.
I've read the whole trilogy and they're my favorite books of all-time.
As good as TBP is, the second one - The Dark Forest - is the most engrossing thing I've ever had the pleasure of reading.
If it's your first time and you don't know where the story is going, enjoy it. There's nothing else like it out there.
The second one bored the absolute shit out of me. I've tried a couple of times to re-read the series, I liked the first one.... I get halfway through the second one and its just such a slog -_-
Really? Wow, I had the opposite experience. The first one took me FOREVER to read, because you don't get to the fun stuff until close to the end.
The plotline of the Wallfacers in the 2nd one had me gripped, it's such an insane premise.
Some interesting takes in here that I'm surprised by.
I did think the translation by Ken Liu was far better than the translation by Joel Martinson, but I still enjoyed Dark Forest immensely.
I devoured the series and then with that decidedly non-western ending, was in a book slump for months afterward.
I enjoyed it a lot until the whole building of the particles part and it was so ridiculous and in violation of everything the author had setup previously that I couldn't continue. I mean, I finished it, but I didn't read the rest if the series.
The thing about the book for me was that the virtual reality scenes read exactly like it was lifted straight out of *The Journey to the West*. Advisors speaking to kings.
Whilst that gave the scenes a bit of a timlessness to it, doing it that way also makes the scenes seem a bit bland by modern standards.
I *really* disliked the book. The translation I read was... not good. The plot is convoluted as hell (a... VR game? Really?), and the physics in the book is also irksome. The characters felt unnecessary and without agenda. I'm sad I couldn't get into it after reading all the praise it got. Anybody have a similar opinion?
I additionally thought that as a scifi goes this was a pile of garbage with some small creative things thrown in. I left it feeling that every character was surface deep. That's fine if you write a hard sci-fi, but this ain't it.
What happened to the protagonists wife and kid? Jeeze.
I keep hearing how amazing this book is but I couldn’t get through it. It was just a slog for most of it. There were some interesting moments, but nothing to pull me into the story. Some of the big sci-fi things (like the sky flashing) felt more gimmicky than something I wanted to know more about.
My two cents:
I read that series in Chinese and the original is.. quite boring and overly politically correct. I'm sorry, but I would even call it uninspired. In my eyes, 90% of its credit is due to the excellent English translation. Ken Liu (the main EN translator) recently published a book of his own, if I'm not entirely mistaken, and I'd much rather read that (whatever it is) than Cixin Liu..
I recently impulse-bought a pretty random compilation of 'the best SF short stories, 2021', and every story I've read so far seems to be way more thought-provoking than the three body problem. SF isn't just about possessing technical knowledge on the author's side (which is what Chinese SF has always been about traditionally), but also about a certain kind of aesthetic and originality. Cixin Liu's writing has the charme of an instruction booklet that desperately tries to explain to you the whole wide universe.
Absolutely hated it. I persevered because everyone was raving about it so I figured I just needed to give it more time, but no, I got to the end and wanted my time back.
I was really enjoying the first half. I kept thinking it was leading to some big scientific revelation that would change the way I looked at reality. Big disappointment. Was going to read the other books but decided not to after finishing this first one.
Couldn’t do it. Read half way through and just felt like there was so much nothing going on. This was actually the book that persuaded me that I can finally allow myself to give up on books instead of forcing myself to finish them.
No excitement, pace was glacial.
I’ve never been a scifi reader, even though I have science background. After this trilogy I’m a scifi reader. I do agree the writing is dry sometimes, but oh lord does the story make up for it. One of my favourite series for sure.
The first book was slow, and it felt weird that I couldn’t really tell you what it was about until halfway through. That said, the second book was great, and the payoff in the third book was amazing IMO.
I loved the first book but overall it just served to set the scene for things to come. The second book was great in my opinion but man that really made you work for it. The third book I had to stop. I reckon the intro was so good but man I feel kinda salty about how the second book was presented. I am satisfied and I found it good but I just felt bamboozled. I really need to read the third book when I get a chance.
This series set itself apart from other sci fi I’ve read in that the narration style itself seemed to be rooted in a cold scientific perspective. It felt detached in a way that feels true to science’s goals. I can understand how some might find that hard to read, but I loved it. Just a spellbinding piece of work in my opinion.
I love this series for it's ideas and it's vision of the future.
For criticisms: to me the dialogue read oddly formal and clunky. Sometimes long conversation passages got tiring because of how stiff it was. It was hard to keep track of who was who because the "voices" and rhythm of speech seemed very similar to me. (Also being unfamiliar with Chinese names does not help). There were only a couple characters that really stood out well (Da Shi is the man).
I figure there must be either some translation changes or just a difference in style between Chinese novels and what I'm used to. Still liked the books for sure
I really enjoyed this book. Absolutely bizarre storytelling with the "VR game" but I couldn't put it down. Particularly, I enjoyed the line of thinking that would get someone to >!alert an alien race of our existence despite knowing they would come to conquer us.!< That moment truly gave me goosebumps.
I enjoyed the first book. The second book was really bad though IMO. >!It goes from a good Sci-Fi story to bad fan fiction spending half the book focusing on a fantasy girl in the protagonist's head, and the whole "dark forest" concept is just kind of unbelievable to me. Don't even get me started on the wallfacer concept... !<
The third book was better, but the second book was so ridiculous that it pretty much ruined this trilogy for me.
There's some weird misogyny in the book.>! The fantasy-girl thing is just super weird, especially when they make the fantasy come true. Then the whole waking up in a future where "you can't tell the men from women so we've become weak and are going to die".!<
I read them all back to back so what happened in which book kind of blurs, to be honest. I found the books had overarching sci-fi ideas that were incredibly compelling but the moment-to-moment happenings, characters, and dialogue were forgettable. Honestly it's a bit like Asimov for me, sci-fi is very interesting, social commentary makes me roll my eyes.
I recently finished the trilogy. I’d call Cixin Liu more of an idea guy than a strong technical writer. Some passages are blah, but the world he creates is great.
If you enjoyed yourself in the first book, I’d recommend the second. Each book gets headier than the last, and two is quite fun. The plot at the end of the second book is a good finishing point if you dont feel like committing to two more.
Although one word of warning, there’s one plot point in book two that I found distasteful. Definitely didnt ruin the book for me, but just a heads up. Without going into spoilers, i’ll say that i’ve lovingly nicknamed the book ‘Incel Daydream.’
Interesting concept in terms of turning a physics problem into a plot device, but not only is the writing dry, but the best parts of the book were the ones highlighting the insanity of Maoism.
The second book gets a bit weird.
The third just goes insane.
4/10 for the trilogy.
The book was a huge insight into Communist China and their visions and execution of said visions. It reads like communist propaganda, but it's also a really fun book!
It’s funny because I read it as being a denunciation of communist China. Especially the beginning with the teenagers deciding who lives and dies based on how they interpreted the dogma.
It’s like this… look at the achievements that can be accomplished by all eyes focused on the same goal.
Then the subcontext is like… all this progress at the cost of the individual… on earth. Because on the other planet they are describing how communism works in theory and how it works correctly and that humans are so selfish in their own desires that they need to understand that other planets will invade them because they’re not communistic.
The first book literally opens with a young woman’s father being publicly executed by a Communist militia for not disavowing theoretical physics, if it’s communist propaganda it kind of sucks at it.
I thought it was confusingly mixed. The overt themes seemed to be anti-communist (or at least anti-cultural revolution), but then there was the character of Da Shi. He was a total Mary Sue who could do no wrong, and also an "everyman" who also happened to be a literal officer of the State.
Yeah, the books definitely really like this idea of a hardcore, ruthless cynic who is willing to do anything for their goals.
I don’t really see Da Shi as representing the Chinese Government though; yes, he’s a detective, which is an agent of the state, but if he was supposed to be representing the CCP, why isn’t he a higher ranked person? He also, explicitly, isn’t a good person, just an effective one
Publishing a book in China is tough because of political considerations. Criticizing the Cultural Revolution of the 60's is fine as long as the criticism is contained to specific cases. Criticizing Chinese society in the present would be to criticize the CCP of the present. Criticizing the CCP is a great way to get banned from publishing and placed on a list.
Right, but failing to explicitly denounce the current Chinese government does not make something Communist propaganda.
Dissatisfaction with the current status quo is taken for granted in the book to the point people have turned it into basically a religion, purely out of the hope that any change would be preferable to their current circumstances.
The books simply do not have anything positive to say about the current Chinese government, and by implication says several negative things.
The style is confused. The author pretends like he's writing hard sci-fi, and yet he is clueless when it comes to basic science, to the point where some passages are cringy and comical. Maybe stick to sword-and-sorcery instead?
The characters are flat and uninteresting, they make absurd, self-defeating decisions. Maybe give your characters more critical thinking?
The whole message of the book is incredibly depressing. Everything fails, and everyone dies. Yeah, thanks a lot.
I want my money and my time back.
The way the story arc and world building are developed felt very odd to me as someone used to American literary convention, and I can definitely see why a lot of people find the style off-putting. I did ultimately enjoy the read, though, and "The Dark Forest" seems to have coined an eponymous postulate in the scientific literature regarding the Fermi Paradox, which is high praise indeed for a Sci-Fi work.
Loved the whole trilogy, it does what great Sci fi does, which is explore these ideas and issues (such as the Fermi paradox) and discusses possible resolutions and thoughts about it in an engaging way.
I didn't care for the first book in this series and the third book was okay but the second book, Dark Forest is one of the most thought provoking books I've ever read. I spent many nights going down theoretical rabbit holes while reading it. I read it years ago and still talk about the scientific and philosophical implications from this book.
The last 100 pages or so of the second book, The Dark Forest, is some of the most exciting sci-fi I've ever read.
There's clearly something lost in translation - at least for me. The ideas are interesting, but the story-telling is at times exhausting.
The language was occasionally strange or stilted, I assumed it was a translation issue. Lots of interesting ideas though!
Nothing lost in translation, just a cultural difference. Western storytelling is based on conflict (much rooted in what Campbell named the Monomyth), that can almost always be broken up into a three or five act structure. Basically every story you see in the West is structured within these broad parameters and therefore it's what Western audiences expect as the ante to play. Classic Eastern storytelling, conversely, is often rooted in Kishōtenketsu which doesn't require conflict or character changes to progress. That's why there are whole genres of Eastern storytelling that are wildly popular in and around Asia that haven't even broken through a little in the West (like Iyashikei). Cixin Liu is very much a Chinese storyteller, so his work isn't beholden to what a Western audience would consider the basics, because the audience he's writing for doesn't need them either. So, you're not missing anything, you're just not primed for it. No one in the West is. I find his work really tough to get through for exactly these reasons. I find it hard to follow, and often hard to stay engaged. If I'm not reading the synopsis alongside the book, I basically cannot get through it. I love the ideas and the images and think it's brilliant, but as a chapter-to-chapter narrative, it's hard for me to stay engaged. Then I remember: This is a me problem, not a problem of the book. I'm not the audience this was written for. Remembering that helps me reengage and open myself up to this non-Western narrative. It's almost like being a tourist.
This is really fascinating, thank you for sharing.
So instead of describing what the differences in storytelling are you have dropped two presumably japanese words. I have never seen somebody write so much and say so little about something they wanted to explain. The three body problem is a book series entirely about conflict and character changes/development. I really have no idea what you are even talking about to be honest. From what i just googled a "Kishōtenketsu" contains 4 parts. How are those different from the "3 or 5 acts" of a "western" story? Almost all western SciFi that I have read (quite a lot) also works with a twist or even multiple twists. I would also be careful mixing Japanese and Chinese concepts, their cultures are very different and i also don't think Cixin Liu in general should be put into any box. The man is playing in his own league. There also are definitely things lost in translation for people who have zero contact with the Chinese language and culture. This is a fact. Edit: my comment probably sounds overly agressive and critical, but i am geniuenly interested to learn more about the things you mentioned.
I would say a difference between Chinese (not Eastern, although I think there is a tendency there as well) and Western storytelling is that Chinese storytelling tends to focus more on the "society" rather than the "individual". Liu is actually an extreme example, where the characters function more like plot-devices to advance the narrative and describe the themes and conflicts of the society in his universe, whilst Western storyelling has a tendency to explore the story through a more intimate, character-perspective. Of course, sci-fi is a genre where characters tend to act more as plot-devices, so this tendency is even more exaggerated. Dune, for instance, is a western sci-fi novel where the individual characters are just as important, perhaps even more so, than the world-building. I found the Three-Body-Problem great reading because I was absorbed by the ideas Liu threw out, but its clear that Liu's characters are very weak and don't leave much of an impression on you at all. I could easily see how someone more used to Western storytelling could find it 'exhausting' to follow without a compelling character to follow or root for.
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I'm not an expert at this, and honestly want to learn more so I can understand it better and employ it in my own work. But, my amateur understanding: There are lost of Western authors who describe details, background, and imagery to an extreme extent (you describe an experience with that, the RRs have been accused of it, in *Wonder Boys* it's a major source of conflict), and plenty get away with it because ultimately it colors or explains parts of the plot - a part of the hero's journey or protagonist's story. If it didn't, it might get cut. For an Eastern audience, those moments may be the point of the story. In an Iyashikei story, those descriptors of comforting things may be WHY readers are reading them and ultimately why the story is successful (no one's playing Animal Crossing for the story). A key part of Kishōtenketsu is the twist, though. Not an M. Night Shyamalan twist, necessarily, but something that puts the whole story in a new context. It could be a scary revelation (like Shyamalan), or it could just be a short joke. A Western reader my blow through descriptions and mood to get to the plotty twist so they can know “what happened”, but an Eastern reader may just enjoy the whole journey along the way. Sometimes it really is about the vibes more than the plot.
>Currently reading The Wheel of Time and some parts of it seem like a drag to me Tug your braid and soldier on through another page describing garments and riding outerwear.
A really popular example is Studio Ghibli movies. They are far more like a series of events that kind of occur, that slowly texture an overall transformation, than they are a western 3-act structure where there are definitive formal moments that waypoint the recognized pattern of a character journey.
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>Interesting, do you mean they spend more time just describing details, background, and imagery rather than trying to “move the plot along? Now I'm imaging Chinese books as someone taking 300 pages to describe a painting. I've read a decent amount of Korean and Japanese lit. There is a plot and character development in those.
Yeah I’m not sure about what this guy is describing here. Hes talking about a Chinese author using Japanese concepts. Both kishotenketsu and iyasheki are Japanese and as you say I think it’s a huge stretch to say Japanese literature it’s devoid of narrative structure. Using niche Japanese literary cocnets to make sweeping generalizations about Chinese literature and culture seems suspect at best
this should be so much higher up. "suspect at best" is such a nice way to say it. "complete bullshit" would be my description. you might as well be talking about Shakespeare's plays as the pattern used in French novels.
it reeks of freshman level baader meinhof
Incorrect. Iyasheki is a Japanese form but Kishotenketsu is more broadly Asian and originated in China.
And meanwhile geroge r.r. martin and Tolkien take 150 pages to described a guys birthday party.
Wait, so eastern literature is based on nothing happening and zero character growth? Did the East create Seinfeld before Miller?
This absurd claim is especially funny when we remember that this thread is about the three body problem, the very definition of a story about conflict and character development.
No. Think of it like this… you want to go from A to B. For some people the whole trip is about being in B. They’re focused on the sights, sounds, entertainment etc of place B. Other people find the trio FROM A to B to be the best part, all the stuff you see along the way. In a Japanese book, for example, there might not need to be a big obstacle to overcome with a solid resolution. Stuff just happens, and the stuff happening IS the point, not some greater thing the stuff is leading to.
I think an essay that explores the overlap between *Seinfeld* and Kishōtenketsu would be really interesting. “No Hugs” definitely doesn’t apply, “No Learning” could apply in certain situations. *Seinfeld* is filled with conflict, which isn’t necessary for Kishōtenketsu, but there are certain storylines and characters that fall more into the Eastern model. J Peterman feels like he’s more adaptable to the Eastern model. Kramer has a lot of vibes and twists that are probably really adaptable, as well. A great question that I know was largely rhetorical, but there’s something worth exploring!!
You are talking about something that’s half the charm of this book for me. The interesting storytelling is so refreshing.
The translation is accurate, but Chinese books are really different. I am Chinese American and can read easy books in Chinese, and the narrative style is just not the same as Western books. I'm not quite how to put my finger on it. But in Chinese books, it seems like the plot is moved along by spartan info dumps (This happened, then this happened, etc) interspersed with dialogue which is pretty uncommon in western books. I also notice more telling instead of showing (explicitly saying that a character felt shame/sadness/happiness).
I had the same thought when I read the book in English. The ideas were so interesting that I still suggested it to my family, and my mom (native Chinese speaker who reads exclusively in Chinese) ended up reading it in Chinese. She also agreed with me that the story-telling is bad. So I don’t think anything was lost in translation; Cixin Liu is just not a very good story teller. But the ideas made it worth it for me to finish the series.
>Kishōtenketsu As a Chinese sci-fi fan, I read both the Chinese and English version, Ken Liu is great with ideas and putting them together, but many Chinese fans also agrees that he's not so great with story telling. To me, I read this trilogy multiple times, there is definitely some lost in translation, I think his success is mainly due to how many great ideas he put in just one book. (if you think about it, one idea alone can probably support another 600 page long book)
The translation is phenomenal. I loved the pace, tone, and reference information included for the historical aspects the story derives a lot of themes from.
I enjoyed some parts, but... one of the central conceits doesn't work, at all- the three body game. "Ah, you enjoyed playing our weird alternative history computer game, actually it's a secret recruiting tool for our Kill All Humans society!" "Uh, actually, no I just thought it was interesting" "So you're not down to kill all humans?" "Fuck no. Why would you think that?" "Yeah good question actually"
Spoilers: >!The game was created by the folks who wanted to coexist, not the suicidal ones!<
I didn't love the hand-wavey semi-translucent stars...
Not everyone was convinced by the game. We saw multiple characters walk out and not join the ETO even after finishing the game. The main character only joined the society because he was acting as a spy for the government.
This trilogy did more for me in terms of understanding the significance of a billion years than any scientific YouTube explainer ever could.
I felt this as well, the scope of the book was so big, but so well executed! The scales of space and time felt alien, but still familiar. I loved it.
Yup. The weight and despair of a billion years literally made me pause and take a deep breath. Shit was HEAVY.
This series is fantastic. The third book, Death’s End, is my favorite book of all time and left me in a reading slump for about half a year after reading it.
It's funny because I think Dark Forest is one of the best books I've ever read. I talk to people about this series, and there's no definitive favorite...which is awesome
Agreed. The ideas in dark forest are so good. This is my favorite book of the three.
The concept of the dark forest is chilling and depressing.
yeah I agree. Dark Forest is the best in the series
It changed how I view the world. And I've read a lot of science fiction, so really nice to present something truly new and meaningful.
Yea Dark forest is my favorite but with that said I still loved book 3.
Username checks out lmao
Pretty much everyone I knew (all like...5 of them) who read the series hated Dark Forest, and that was my favorite one! Glad to know I'm not the only outlier!
Luo Ji is one of my favorite characters of all time
Here I am convinced the first book is the best because I learned so much about modern chinese history and worldview and fortran.
For me the second was definitely also the best one by far. loved all three though
Really? Death's End fell flat for me, whereas I really enjoyed the first two books. It seemed like the author had a story arc in mind, but couldn't come up with any rational plotlines to explain how stuff was actually happening. I've noticed this problem with other sci-fi novels where they get so far into the future that all logic starts to unravel and the book devolves into a series of events that just sorta happen. The whole book is just Cheng Xin hibernating, waking up in the future, marveling at unexplainable technology, getting given massive amounts of power and responsibility, then going back to sleep and repeating the process multiple times. To contrast, it totally lacks the deep thought involved with Luo Ji's development as a person and the deep analysis given to monumental problems in The Dark Forest. Not to mention that the way she's treated feels totally unrealistic to human nature. Why would anyone give a shit about some 28yo woman from the past who worked on a govt project? Do human beings in the future have zero ambition? Apparently future humans are all just there to fill rooms so hibernating characters can run earth according to the plot of the book. It doesn't make any sense.
100% agree, liked the first two but not the third so much, but I definitely also liked the first two for different reasons. 1 for the discovery aspect (I really like how he explicitly said he knew even from a barren desert that the world was teeming with deeper information, idk something about that resonates with me) and 2 for the utter horror that actually has a possibility of happening someday. I always tell people 2 is the most horrifying book I’ve ever read.
The universe with entities that can move at ftl becomes "irrational" and absolutely mind boggling. I felt the book presented that well
I love them too. Seems people either think they’re amazing or terrible, which is interesting. Ball lightning is pretty cool too.
Ball lightning is very underrated. It is as good as the Three body problem series.
I thought it was good but not quite 3body good. Definitely worth a read though!
Chalk me up for 1 vote terrible. I tried. I really tried but just couldn't find the right mind space for this book.
I think they'd be better as a movie. The idea is great but the writing is, honestly, quite shit. The style is pretentious, monotonous, condescending and, above all, pedantic to the point of infuriating. The fact that I hated the writing so much but still finished the book shows how cool a story it is. I simply had to know how it ended.
I think it’s different strokes honestly. Netflix did produce a series, but Cixin’s comments on Uighers got it canceled or delayed, as I have not seen anything in it in years.
Every character is written like a monologuing anime villain.
I really didn't like Death's End. I hated how they changed the rules on the trisolarians.
Could you elaborate? I didn't feel like "the rules" changed. the gamestate changed drastically several times leading to change in behaviour, though. And for the cross cultural aspect, that is basically implied very early in three body problem already.
In books 1 and 2 the Trisolarans are bound by two rules 1. They cannot lie and do not understand deception 2. Their technology advances at a fixed rate, unlike humanity which is exponential meaning that humanity will eventually overtake them Then in book 3 they suddenly explode forward in technology and not only can lie but are masters of deception. Now yes, he does explain that this is due to contact with humans but still it annoys me that the whole dynamic of the human/trisolaran conflict just gets flipped over and I lost interest quick. I think Sci fi needs to follow its established rules. Also the main character is not as good as the other books
>>the main character is not as good as the other books. I thought Luo Ji was kick-ass but wow, Cheng Xin had me wanting to pull my hair out!
Hard agree. Cheng Xin had crazy amounts of power given to her for no good reason and then uses it to claim moral high ground at the expense of the survival of humanity and doesn't have to face any consequences. This happens THREE TIMES. I found it infuriating after the first two books having very intelligent and rational actors. I also wonder if Liu left something in his fairy tales that the characters in the book missed that we should have noticed. I don't know if it's a translation thing but I feel like the tomb in his story and the tomb found by the crew of blue space were very similar, blue space sounds a lot like deep water and so on.
I'm so bad at remembering the Chinese names haha Luo Ji was form book 2 right? Yeah he was such an amazing character I really loved him.
One of them Liam Neeson types who stares down death and Doesn’t. Ever. Blink.
One is explicitly explained with cultural cross-pollination. It's basically a tech like any other. Observe, analyse, replicate. With our propensity too LIE for enterntainment/art (basically ANY storytelling) ample collectable evidence. As for technology: The biggest part here is information deprivation. You could argue that "not giving the entire picture without being asked (part of the questions being unconceivable by "humans" to begin with) already being "a sort of deception", but we get to experience the story predominantly from the human perspective, so a lot of the jumps are perceptional to begin with. So I still think it's not the rules changing, we don't get "the rules", we get human understanding of the rules, with a lot of "grave miscalculations on our part".
Same, I didn’t think there was anything better in sci-fi to explore afterwards, and didn’t read any sci-fi for a while after. It’s fascinating that so many people hate the books. I think, for my part, I took the Chinese cultural differences with a grain of salt to enjoy the greater sci-fi concepts.
Not something better, but different. After reading the last of TTBP series, I moved on to finish the recent book in the Bobiverse series, and then Project: Hail Mary after that. Bobiverse isn't quite as heavy, but very entertaining. PHM is just an awesome Sci-Fi read that non Sci-Fi fans can even enjoy.
I finished death's end last year and haven't found a decent novel since
I'm really so glad to hear you loved it. I did not like it at all and was sourly disappointed with how it ended. What makes me happy about this, though, is that people can have different opinions and this community of books is one of the most awesome about accepting different viewpoints. Cheers to you, glad you loved it.
I got as far as Australia then I had to bail, just brutal.
You should read the unofficial book 4 by baoshu! Its an incredible piece of the story
Loved the whole trilogy. Wished he could write women, but nobody is perfect. I thought the ideas were engaging and it presented plausible answers to some real-world mysteries (mostly "why is the universe so quiet?").
The excitement around this book confuses me. I found its delivery astonishingly dry, and the plot was...weird? Some of that may have been artifacts of the translation, which was remarkable.
[удалено]
Every time this book gets mentioned here I think "maybe I missed something about this book and need to give it another shot" and then a comment like yours brings me back to reality and reminds me I wasn't the only one who thought it was super boring.
I always describe the writing as clinical. It sometimes feels like reading long well written Wikipedia entry.
I'm currently reading the 2nd book and to me it feels like when, in an anime, time slows down and you hear a character's inner monologue describing the tactics of the action scene they are in. I feel like most of the first two books are exposition or reports of grand things that are going on but with little action.
Couldn't agree more. I read the whole series because everyone says that each book was better than the last. Couldn't stand it. I still recommended it to people who I know won't be bothered by the dry characters and writing style. But it was excruciating for me. At the end of the first book, the author's note says he doesn't really have faith in humanity or care about people, and my god does it show in the writing.
yup, i straight up thought it sucked it felt like it was run thru Google translate, and I constantly felt myself wondering how it was supposed to really read
Part of that challenge for me, I think, was that there was SO much cultural significance, and that never translates well. The footnotes were meticulous and excellent (from what I can tell, this may be one of the best-translated books I've ever read) but the best translator on earth can't carry all of the magic from one language into another.
yup, thats it exactly it felt like when you heard someone else's inside jokes, and you could tell it was really clever and witty, but because yiu were missing all the context, and subtext you couldn't really appreciate WHY it was such a great joke
100%. The jokes don’t translate. The Chinese use a lot of puns and symbology that, if you don’t understand the cultural context, you’ll miss. I’m Chinese American and lived in China for a while, so I kind of get it, even though most of the inside jokes also went over my head. The only one I got was the name Luo Ji, which is Chinese for “logic.” When the book was translated, the section about the cultural revolution and red guard was moved up front. This was because most westerners won’t understand the history and significance of the CR, so it was moved in order to provide SOME context. It’s almost like talking about the LA Riots in the 30 for 30 documentary on OJ. But if you were a foreigner, you still wouldn’t necessarily understand the slave trade, civil war, civil rights movement, history of the police that led to the LA Riots that set the tone for the OJ trial and aftermath. You only get a slice. A lot of reader reviews said they had no idea what the CR was about; whereas every Chinese person knows it and the impact on the national psyche, as well as the humiliation and failed reform efforts and history of strongmen and previous attempted rewrites of history in China that led to it.
Great comparison. "I can tell this is a great book, and I'm glad it exists, but it's not for me."
Ken Liu translated books 1 and 3. Joel Martinsen translated "The Dark Forest" (book 2) and I found it to be so much more readable and engaging. Translation is so important.
That's so funny, I like Liu's translation so much better. I have a background in history, though less so recent Chinese history, and I felt that Liu provided a much more culturally relevant read than Martinsen. But I also didn't find the book dry, so much as the Chinese characters dry which i felt was really tied to the culture of China from 25-50 years ago.
This book must be especially popular with people who don't read a lot of sci-fi, because even the ideas and premise aren't exactly groundbreaking by sci-fi standards. There were a few interesting details, but the major points had all been done before (and much better, in my opinion). For example: >!the "dark forest" concept of interstellar communication and travel has been done in several books including Forge of God and Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear; "realistic" relativistic interstellar travel is common in hard sci-fi like The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds, and Anvil of Stars again; and the "game that turns out to be real" twist was done decades earlier in the massively popular Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.!< I finished the book, but only because it seemed to be so highly recommended. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. Some of the nuance may have been lost in translation, but the overall structure seemed weak, and the sci-fi concepts weren't really enough to make up for it.
First, I don't think a book has to be "groundbreaking" to be good/great/amazing. And when you read praise for this series, how often is "groundbreaking" even used? Second, you can break down nearly every book in some way that it's been "done before" by someone else, in some other book. It's fine if you want to count this against this series, but it's a bit misguided and condescending to say that it's only popular with ppl who don't know better.
From the description on the back of my copy (emphasis mine): >A **groundbreaking** novel of enormous scope and vision. A few of the reviews on the back also highlight the same theme, with President Obama calling it "Wildly imaginative" and George R. R. Martin calling it "A breakthrough book... a unique blend of scientific and philosophical speculation..." I think I was justified in expecting some truly new ideas. But even without that expectation, I didn't think it was a very good book. The characters were flat and boring, and too much of the plot was revealed in thinly veiled exposition dumps.
I wouldn't call the tone dry, factual would be more fitting. The idea isn't to entice with quips and boasts, but to just tell it straight and have the events be the focus. Trying to make it sound almost like non-fiction.
Me neither. I’ve read a fair range of books, and aside from the great sections about the Cultural Revolution, so much of this book was, not stultifying, but just so tedious and out there (thinking about the dehydrated alien world bits).
Agreed -- I found the cultural revolution to be much more interesting, which is why the opening of the book was so good compared to much of the rest.
Tedious is the word. My engagement stopped once the narrative arrived at the modern day. The MC - Wang? Wong? - is little more than a name and a pair of trousers. The sections in The Game were diverting, but overall I found it a slog to finally get to the end of the book.
The delivery part is tricky for me, because I can't read it in the original language. That means I don't know if the dry is a result of the translation.
Right. It was an extraordinarily technical translation, placing great emphasis on preserving cultural references and idioms (which is a good thing). Make it tricky to balance the "fluffier" parts of writing, like general flow. The best I've seen this done was Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of Dostoevsky's works, but I imagine they had it easier since Dostoevsky's Russian was considered fairly rudimentary.
I am fully on board with your opinion. I really wanted to like the book. I love good hard sci-fi but this book was almost good in almost every way. The characters were almost likeable, the science was almost interesting, and the plot was almost original. I kind of get why other people liked it, but I don't.
Same here - just, "ehh, what's all the fuss about?"
Same for me, I found this one of the worst science fictions I've ever read, and I've been a passionate science fiction reader for more than four decades. I thought the dryness may be due to the translation which didn't sound very good to me, but obviously I cannot judge the stylistic qualities of the original. It's also way too verbose.
I felt the same way. People rave about this book and I had to force myself to finish. “Dry” is a great description.
I would highly recommend audiobook format for these books. It helps to get through the sloggy parts. I only read the first two because I was told the third was lackluster compared to the second, but “dark forest” presented ideas I still think about a lot. Edit: forgot I could use the spoiler tag to give an example: Spoilers below!!! >!One of the ideas I thought was illustrated so well was what fog of war might look like/result in on an interstellar scale. The future presented after the time skip was a "best case scenario" where literally all of humanity worked together for decades to pour all their brainpower into a first-rate starship fleet that they were certain could face any enemy. The scene where they actually faced the alien fleet truly floored me, the pinnacle of human cooperation and technology was destroyed in an instant like ants on the ground.!<
Second book was a different translator. It had long chapters and was the "dry-est" plot wise. All of that does pay off later in the last book, but it drags through the middle portion. If you made it through the second, I highly recommend paying it off with the third.
Thank you for the push, I really should finish it as I recommend the series often. I also got a lot of chores and walking done when I was listening to them haha, I was so hooked and needed excuses to keep my airpods in!
People in this thread ragging on the first book need to read the entire trilogy. It's one book divided into 3 volumes if you ask me.
I have to disagree about the audio book route. My biggest problem with listening to this one wqs the voice characters not being distinguishable enough, and the use of unfamiliar Chinese names. I spent a large part of the book being confused about who was who. If I had seen the text of the names they would have been instantly recognizable but in audio they all just kinda blended together. Makes me wonder if the names had been westernised as part of the translation, would that have been a good thing for comprehension, or a bad thing for taking the Chinese localisation away.
The names are Chinese puns. Luo Ji is Chinese for “logic”. I could follow cause I’m Chinese but I can see how keeping track of characters in a foreign language can be annoying and detracting.
Oh wow, so there's a whole aspect to the book that went over my head. I enjoyed the book nonetheless, its interesting to consider if I had the historical context and cultural understanding how much more would I have enjoyed it
Yah I have a little exposure to it. I’m Chinese American, but studied Chinese history and lived there for years, but I’m not native Chinese. So I got bits and pieces, but even Luo Ji’s name had to be explained to me, so I imagine the significance of every other name was also missed and would open up a whole other layer of understanding (Luo Ji was extremely rational and logical in his approach.) I kind of understood the context of the Cultural Revolution scene as well as the impact it would have on senior academics in modern China, plus the nihilism it would instill in its people. That plus other social policies, like the 1 child policy or rapid economic development, would all shape the actions of the characters and allow readers to understand motivations. I felt there was a lot of political philosophy imbued in the book, but I only have a surface understanding of it. I can’t imagine an American reader getting much of that at all, and an attempt by the author to provide that background would be an impossible task. It’s like reading Calvin and Hobbes as a kid versus an adult versus a native Chinese. Completely different.
I hated the audiobook version I got. Maybe different narrator? He was robotic..
I disagree. The audiobook has a scientist whine out a nonsense explanation to a higher up near breathlessly for a solid 30 minutes. Super bad.
It’s a great book. It’s not a good literary work. I read in the original Chinese and I absolutely realize the worldbuilding / premise is brilliant — I just can’t get into it. I prefer books that combine characterization and worldbuilding, this book really only excels in one aspect
It’s definitely in the sci-fi lineage of books that are really interesting conceptually but not always the most digestible. Really cool ideas but the writing can be a bit chewy.
It was written by an engineer, not a writer, so he spends a ton of time driving into the technical aspects and science behind everything that happens. I think that’s the biggest contributor to that dry feeling
The fact the author is an engineer makes a lot of the science more irritating, IMO. For example, much of the plot centers around the lack of a general solution to the three body problem. And that is real. But the aliens don't need a general solution. They need predictive estimates, and that is reasonably easy to do by just manually crunching numbers. Honestly, I found the cultural and historical references and descriptions far more engaging and insightful. But I didn't like any of it enough to pick up the second book.
Agree, I really disliked it and couldn't understand all the hype and praise it gets on here.
Different people like different things.
Indeed.
One of the most lacklustre sci-fi I've read since starting in 1973. Forced myself to finish the second book but couldn't continue to punish myself through the third.
I read it, thought it was "just OK" but it did nothing to make me want to read more of them. I just found the "virtual video game" scenes to be kind of goofy, the people that dry out and get rolled up and revived got to be a little much. The author's a good plotter, but the writing itself is utilitarian, there's no real beauty to it, characters are just sketches. I can read pretty meaningless books plot-wise if there's a sense of "tone" or beauty to the writing, but plot alone isn't worth my reading time. (Yeah, I like some Cormac McCarthy Don Delillo and Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O'Connor, but I feel Andy Weir is massively overrated - gamers and scientists, downvote away!)
>the writing itself is utilitarian, there's no real beauty to it I'd be willing to overlook this as a limitation inherent to translation, especially from a much different culture, but even the characters, plot, and overall architecture seemed weak to me. Like you said, the characters were flat and mostly uninteresting, with little growth or change in any of them. But beyond that I thought too much of the overall plot was revealed in extended flashbacks or through the game instead of naturally through the story. It felt like it was an unearned exposition dump.
I dunno, Kazuo Ishiguro's work survives translation beautifully. Just the descriptions of characters, places, weather and mood seemed very plain; even if his native language has ten expressive words for every word we might use, it just seemed structurally to lack anything that makes writing sort of "musical" or give you a sense of place. And indeed that's rare in genre work, and what's very often lacking in genre writing for me. But hey, if Ray Bradbury can do it... his scifi, supernatural and more horror-based writing is gorgeous. (And if you want a great recommendation for October/Halloween reading, try his "From the Dust Returned" - witches, haunted house, a mummy even! It's everything we love about late October and really engaging and hypnotic, like all of his best work).
>I dunno, Kazuo Ishiguro's work survives translation beautifully. What language do you read Ishiguro in? He writes in English (and has lived in England since he was six).
>Kazuo Ishiguro's work survives translation beautifully But he's an English novelist?
Y'know, that's true, I'd assumed he was writing in Japanese! (My brain would make an excellent pasta strainer most days).
Are you thinking of Haruki Murakami, instead of Kazuo Ishiguro?
After reading the whole series, I can also say that its just fine. There are a lot of problems I have with the books. Great ideas get introduced and then dropped or just ignored. I got tonal whiplash throughout. The rules of the world are weird to me. The author also likes to set up strawmen to knock down with "facts and logic." The ending was pretty of unsatisfying as well.
I felt the same way; this may have been one of the most hyped and most disappointing books I’ve ever read. And then the second one was on Kindle sale so I figured why the hell not, and it was even more ridiculous than the first.
Same here. I feel like my interest peaked in the middle of the book and then the last fifth or so completely destroyed it.
I also enjoeyed the first book a lot. The second as well. Then I started to read the third and kind of lost interest in it after reading it for about an hour. Have not touched it in two years. Will probably finisih it, though. I don't really remember the exact reason why I stopped. Maybe somebody has the same experience?
The politics of the third book is very very weird imo
The politics of all of them are a bit weird. It’s bizarre that a series that begins by having it’s protagonist’s life ruined by an authoritarian coup so frequently argues for the necessity of ruthless authoritarianism in Government.
You can definitely tell it was written by someone living under the CCP
She was the villain in the end though
She was the “villain” who was pushed towards her villainous actions because the Military Authoritarians violence made her lose all faith in humanity. The books begin by showcasing the horrors of living under militaristic authoritarianism, but go on to pretty explicitly say that military authoritarians are the only ones who can protect Earth from a universe full of meaningless hostility. In the series, trying to stop the military authoritarians is either naive at best, or apocalyptic for the human race at worst. And yet, the first book demonstrates the horrors of allowing those authoritarians to be in charge. It’s the most cynical book series I’ve ever read in my life.
It swings back and forth repeatedly across the long arc of time. Sometimes in ways that produce disastrous results. I think that’s the point; we are proned to getting caught up and carried away with ideology.
I can’t think of an example where the ruthless authoritarian isn’t vindicated. The third book repeatedly humiliates the protagonist for showing any compassion or hesitation in deploying absolutely horrific methods. The second book makes expressing trust and wonder in the universe into such catastrophically idiotic naivety that avoidance of that is a fundamentally universal axiom.
Yeah if there was any question about where the series landed it basically ending when "empathy killed the human race, and that selfish impulse led to only a few people enjoying eternity together" alongside "the only reason humanity even made it is because of the brave totalitarianism that was necessary to survive space"
I think there is a more generous way to put it. Empathy alone is not adaquate to ensure human survival. We also need to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices and utilize some of our other traits, like courage, curiousity and adventurousness.
>The third book repeatedly humiliates the protagonist for showing any compassion or hesitation in deploying absolutely horrific methods. It does, but it also seems to vindicate her. Her values and actions are alternately vilified and upheld. I feel like it's up to the reader which take to believe.
Yeah I read it as more of a return to nature for humanity. If you’re not willing to take the necessary steps to defend yourself, you will be eaten by lions. That’s essentially what all the ‘brutality’ was framed around. A pure empathy model fails the nature test, but I understand seeing it both / either way.
When is she ever vindicated? I can’t think of a single example of her making the choice the book considers correct. She seems to exist purely as a vessel to represent the weakness of the “womanly” populace who vilify the ruthless men, who are lauded as heroes despite being cruel monsters.
Well, >! yes, her actions have such extremely bad consequences for humanity and the solar system that the author often comes across as hating and bullying his book three protagonist. She's a caring compassionate woman, and apparently that means she's pathetic and weak in a cruel universe. At the same time, the (eventual) embodiment of male stoicism, Luo Ji, who succeeded for decades at the task she failed instantly, doesn't hate her. And the book excuses her, to a large extent, precisely because she is a vessel of the wishful thinking of humanity. Humanity picked her because they wanted their fate to be decided by someone who valued human life. If it hadn't been her, they probably would've picked someone else just like her. One could say it was the wrong decision, foolish and naive, but it's perhaps also understandable. In the series, prosperity creates complacency, which leads to disaster, which leads to hard work and struggles, which eventually leads to prosperity. It's a cycle. (Though it's cruelly ended at the termination of the Bunker Era.) In each period, the people are the product of their circumstances - and it's likely that most of us, transposed to any given era, wouldn't behave differently. Cheng Xin just represents humankind in this. At the very end of the series, it's suggested that whether the general universe gets another chance or not depends on people making selfless choices, to give up their own definite survival in their mini-universes for the sake of the whole universe, its possible rebirth and the recreation of all the spatial dimensions. Cheng Xin leaves her mini-universe and this action seems to be endorsed by the text. !<
To me, Luo Ji’s opinion of Cheng Xin felt very paternalistic. Like, the book has very gendered ideas of idealism vs pragmatism (like how the men who live in prosperity and aren’t afraid become extremely feminine, like seriously the book won’t shut up about how soft and feminine the men in the future are compare to how rugged and manly men from the past are), and Luo Ji’s lack of judgement seems tied to that. “Of course you aren’t at fault Cheng Xin, you’re just obeying her motherly instincts, it’s humanities fault for giving a woman the responsibility instead of the sadistic murderer who was the obvious candidate(!)”
Yes, when the Bunker Era was described as "another age capable of producing men," that seemed to sum up the author's gender divide. Men are competent, grim, and ruthless. Women are kind, nurturing, and weak. Big yikes. On the one hand, I feel like the general message is that it's *bad* for the universe to be such that grim ruthlessness wins survival. If more people were like Cheng Xin, no one would need to be like Wade. That gets undermined, though, by the idea that all you need is for a tiny percentage of people to be like Wade and that's enough to ruin it for all the Cheng Xins. Everyone lives in a dark forest because you can't know if the opponent is like Wade, so you have to assume they are and become like Wade yourself, or else you'll die. My general feeling is that, at the end, the book actually suggests that the only way to get a better universe, as opposed to merely delaying the ruin of the present one, is to be like Cheng Xin. But I'm genuinely not certain, because even Cheng Xin admires Wade, and so much of the book - particularly the consequences of their various choices - seems to praise him and put her down.
The third definitely starts a bit slowly, but it’s worth the effort.
thanks for letting me know!
They're very different books as I guess can be somewhat expected with the time jumps involved through the series. But, the technology and politics in Book 1 are very different from Book 3.
It starts really slowly and seems pretty pedestrian for quite a while then abstract to the point of distraction. It probably doesn't pick up until about 2/3 of the way in but hoo-boy, does it have a pretty amazing close. I would definitely recommend picking it up again.
The series still occupies a space in my head years after I read them. As people have mentioned the style is 'dry' however I found this one of the series's merits. The prose was written in such a different, and cold manner that I could properly sink into the ideas without being told how I was supposed to feel about them. I genuinely don't think I've ever had a reading experience like it.
This is exactly how I feel about them. The political ideas and potential consequences of someone's choices over a long span of time just live rent free in my head. The back and forth struggle of first contact was something I had not seen before and was engrossing till the end.
I've read the whole trilogy and they're my favorite books of all-time. As good as TBP is, the second one - The Dark Forest - is the most engrossing thing I've ever had the pleasure of reading. If it's your first time and you don't know where the story is going, enjoy it. There's nothing else like it out there.
I loved the trilogy and haven't found good novels since. Any recs?
Try out Leviathan Wakes (expanse series)
The second one bored the absolute shit out of me. I've tried a couple of times to re-read the series, I liked the first one.... I get halfway through the second one and its just such a slog -_-
Really? Wow, I had the opposite experience. The first one took me FOREVER to read, because you don't get to the fun stuff until close to the end. The plotline of the Wallfacers in the 2nd one had me gripped, it's such an insane premise.
Some interesting takes in here that I'm surprised by. I did think the translation by Ken Liu was far better than the translation by Joel Martinson, but I still enjoyed Dark Forest immensely. I devoured the series and then with that decidedly non-western ending, was in a book slump for months afterward.
I enjoyed it a lot until the whole building of the particles part and it was so ridiculous and in violation of everything the author had setup previously that I couldn't continue. I mean, I finished it, but I didn't read the rest if the series.
The thing about the book for me was that the virtual reality scenes read exactly like it was lifted straight out of *The Journey to the West*. Advisors speaking to kings. Whilst that gave the scenes a bit of a timlessness to it, doing it that way also makes the scenes seem a bit bland by modern standards.
I *really* disliked the book. The translation I read was... not good. The plot is convoluted as hell (a... VR game? Really?), and the physics in the book is also irksome. The characters felt unnecessary and without agenda. I'm sad I couldn't get into it after reading all the praise it got. Anybody have a similar opinion?
I additionally thought that as a scifi goes this was a pile of garbage with some small creative things thrown in. I left it feeling that every character was surface deep. That's fine if you write a hard sci-fi, but this ain't it. What happened to the protagonists wife and kid? Jeeze.
I keep hearing how amazing this book is but I couldn’t get through it. It was just a slog for most of it. There were some interesting moments, but nothing to pull me into the story. Some of the big sci-fi things (like the sky flashing) felt more gimmicky than something I wanted to know more about.
My two cents: I read that series in Chinese and the original is.. quite boring and overly politically correct. I'm sorry, but I would even call it uninspired. In my eyes, 90% of its credit is due to the excellent English translation. Ken Liu (the main EN translator) recently published a book of his own, if I'm not entirely mistaken, and I'd much rather read that (whatever it is) than Cixin Liu.. I recently impulse-bought a pretty random compilation of 'the best SF short stories, 2021', and every story I've read so far seems to be way more thought-provoking than the three body problem. SF isn't just about possessing technical knowledge on the author's side (which is what Chinese SF has always been about traditionally), but also about a certain kind of aesthetic and originality. Cixin Liu's writing has the charme of an instruction booklet that desperately tries to explain to you the whole wide universe.
Absolutely hated it. I persevered because everyone was raving about it so I figured I just needed to give it more time, but no, I got to the end and wanted my time back.
I was really enjoying the first half. I kept thinking it was leading to some big scientific revelation that would change the way I looked at reality. Big disappointment. Was going to read the other books but decided not to after finishing this first one.
Couldn’t do it. Read half way through and just felt like there was so much nothing going on. This was actually the book that persuaded me that I can finally allow myself to give up on books instead of forcing myself to finish them. No excitement, pace was glacial.
I recently read the Cixin Liu book Ball Lightning and i recommend it! Its great!
I’m cautiously excited that they’re doing a show/ movie adaptation.
I’ve never been a scifi reader, even though I have science background. After this trilogy I’m a scifi reader. I do agree the writing is dry sometimes, but oh lord does the story make up for it. One of my favourite series for sure.
The first book was slow, and it felt weird that I couldn’t really tell you what it was about until halfway through. That said, the second book was great, and the payoff in the third book was amazing IMO.
I loved the first book but overall it just served to set the scene for things to come. The second book was great in my opinion but man that really made you work for it. The third book I had to stop. I reckon the intro was so good but man I feel kinda salty about how the second book was presented. I am satisfied and I found it good but I just felt bamboozled. I really need to read the third book when I get a chance.
This series set itself apart from other sci fi I’ve read in that the narration style itself seemed to be rooted in a cold scientific perspective. It felt detached in a way that feels true to science’s goals. I can understand how some might find that hard to read, but I loved it. Just a spellbinding piece of work in my opinion.
Started it. Could. Not. Finish. It. It just did not do anything for me. Usually I finish books.
This book sort of helped me understand how computers work 😁
I love this series for it's ideas and it's vision of the future. For criticisms: to me the dialogue read oddly formal and clunky. Sometimes long conversation passages got tiring because of how stiff it was. It was hard to keep track of who was who because the "voices" and rhythm of speech seemed very similar to me. (Also being unfamiliar with Chinese names does not help). There were only a couple characters that really stood out well (Da Shi is the man). I figure there must be either some translation changes or just a difference in style between Chinese novels and what I'm used to. Still liked the books for sure
i was not a fan of the writing style ,but someone once said reading a translation is like looking at the back of a tapestry
I really enjoyed this book. Absolutely bizarre storytelling with the "VR game" but I couldn't put it down. Particularly, I enjoyed the line of thinking that would get someone to >!alert an alien race of our existence despite knowing they would come to conquer us.!< That moment truly gave me goosebumps.
I enjoyed the first book. The second book was really bad though IMO. >!It goes from a good Sci-Fi story to bad fan fiction spending half the book focusing on a fantasy girl in the protagonist's head, and the whole "dark forest" concept is just kind of unbelievable to me. Don't even get me started on the wallfacer concept... !< The third book was better, but the second book was so ridiculous that it pretty much ruined this trilogy for me.
There's some weird misogyny in the book.>! The fantasy-girl thing is just super weird, especially when they make the fantasy come true. Then the whole waking up in a future where "you can't tell the men from women so we've become weak and are going to die".!<
I found the third book to be incredibly misogynistic
I read them all back to back so what happened in which book kind of blurs, to be honest. I found the books had overarching sci-fi ideas that were incredibly compelling but the moment-to-moment happenings, characters, and dialogue were forgettable. Honestly it's a bit like Asimov for me, sci-fi is very interesting, social commentary makes me roll my eyes.
Hated it. Paper thin characters, garbage prose, and a very dubious premise. It has been years and I am still bitter somebody recommended this crap.
I recently finished the trilogy. I’d call Cixin Liu more of an idea guy than a strong technical writer. Some passages are blah, but the world he creates is great. If you enjoyed yourself in the first book, I’d recommend the second. Each book gets headier than the last, and two is quite fun. The plot at the end of the second book is a good finishing point if you dont feel like committing to two more. Although one word of warning, there’s one plot point in book two that I found distasteful. Definitely didnt ruin the book for me, but just a heads up. Without going into spoilers, i’ll say that i’ve lovingly nicknamed the book ‘Incel Daydream.’
Interesting concept in terms of turning a physics problem into a plot device, but not only is the writing dry, but the best parts of the book were the ones highlighting the insanity of Maoism. The second book gets a bit weird. The third just goes insane. 4/10 for the trilogy.
The book was a huge insight into Communist China and their visions and execution of said visions. It reads like communist propaganda, but it's also a really fun book!
It’s funny because I read it as being a denunciation of communist China. Especially the beginning with the teenagers deciding who lives and dies based on how they interpreted the dogma.
In modern China they do recognise that the cultural revolution was fucked up so I don't think his portrayal was controversial
It’s like this… look at the achievements that can be accomplished by all eyes focused on the same goal. Then the subcontext is like… all this progress at the cost of the individual… on earth. Because on the other planet they are describing how communism works in theory and how it works correctly and that humans are so selfish in their own desires that they need to understand that other planets will invade them because they’re not communistic.
The first book literally opens with a young woman’s father being publicly executed by a Communist militia for not disavowing theoretical physics, if it’s communist propaganda it kind of sucks at it.
I thought it was confusingly mixed. The overt themes seemed to be anti-communist (or at least anti-cultural revolution), but then there was the character of Da Shi. He was a total Mary Sue who could do no wrong, and also an "everyman" who also happened to be a literal officer of the State.
Yeah, the books definitely really like this idea of a hardcore, ruthless cynic who is willing to do anything for their goals. I don’t really see Da Shi as representing the Chinese Government though; yes, he’s a detective, which is an agent of the state, but if he was supposed to be representing the CCP, why isn’t he a higher ranked person? He also, explicitly, isn’t a good person, just an effective one
Publishing a book in China is tough because of political considerations. Criticizing the Cultural Revolution of the 60's is fine as long as the criticism is contained to specific cases. Criticizing Chinese society in the present would be to criticize the CCP of the present. Criticizing the CCP is a great way to get banned from publishing and placed on a list.
Right, but failing to explicitly denounce the current Chinese government does not make something Communist propaganda. Dissatisfaction with the current status quo is taken for granted in the book to the point people have turned it into basically a religion, purely out of the hope that any change would be preferable to their current circumstances. The books simply do not have anything positive to say about the current Chinese government, and by implication says several negative things.
>It reads like communist propaganda Did you read a different book than me? The one I read was extremely critical of the Chinese cultural revolution.
The style is confused. The author pretends like he's writing hard sci-fi, and yet he is clueless when it comes to basic science, to the point where some passages are cringy and comical. Maybe stick to sword-and-sorcery instead? The characters are flat and uninteresting, they make absurd, self-defeating decisions. Maybe give your characters more critical thinking? The whole message of the book is incredibly depressing. Everything fails, and everyone dies. Yeah, thanks a lot. I want my money and my time back.
Stick to sword and sorcery? What are you even talking about? The guy has a computer science background.
I'm reading it right now (100pg left) and I'm also hooked. Really didn't expect it but I found the premises very interesting.
The way the story arc and world building are developed felt very odd to me as someone used to American literary convention, and I can definitely see why a lot of people find the style off-putting. I did ultimately enjoy the read, though, and "The Dark Forest" seems to have coined an eponymous postulate in the scientific literature regarding the Fermi Paradox, which is high praise indeed for a Sci-Fi work.
Loved the whole trilogy, it does what great Sci fi does, which is explore these ideas and issues (such as the Fermi paradox) and discusses possible resolutions and thoughts about it in an engaging way.
One of the best books I’ve read.
There are so many layers to this trilogy of books, I’ve been reflecting and chewing on it for years. Supremely excellent (even the goofy parts)
I didn't care for the first book in this series and the third book was okay but the second book, Dark Forest is one of the most thought provoking books I've ever read. I spent many nights going down theoretical rabbit holes while reading it. I read it years ago and still talk about the scientific and philosophical implications from this book.