The Three-Body Problem
Jun. 19th, 2020 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealThis was very, very good.
I mentioned before feeling like I'd kind of rushed through, but I think the issue is that the last few chapters aren't quite as strong as the rest, so it's like "did that just happen? really? eh, whatever." I'm hoping that some of those issues will be resolved in the sequels, but those are supposed to be less character-driven and more zoomed-out.
-The first chapter is about a young woman witnessing her father's violent death in the Cultural Revolution. The rest of Part I follows her shifting fortunes politically as she gets on the bad side of the authorities, and rescued thanks to her astrophysics publications. There's very little speculative elements, except for an Ominous Government Antenna Literally And Figuratively Looming Over Everyone.
And yet, it works, it wasn't too bleak or "realistic" for me to give up. I'm wondering whether this is because the Cultural Revolution/Chinese history in general is something I know very little about, so it's novel enough to be engaging? I've read some books (Robert Sawyer is an offender here) that promise SF and eventually get there but not before a lot of unpleasant realism.
-The narrator's voice occasionally zooms out to be like "Historians would later recognize Bai Mulin betraying his comrade under pressure as an important turning point in the history of the human race, although his later life was disappointingly boring for them." Neat (and this kind of narrative zoom-out works better for me than, say, "Too Like the Lightning."
-Allusion to "The Little Match Girl"! I wonder if that's in the original or there was another allusion that Ken Liu "translated" to this one.
-There's a budding romance between scientists Ye Wenjie and Yang Weining, who was once Wenjie's father's student. "Proof" vibes!
-"maybe Yang Dong's childhood made her somewhat autistic" oh, come on
-Wang Miao (the main character in the "present-day" section) has a wife and a six-year-old son but we get very little about them, except that little Dou Dou likes playing with his dad's camera when allowed. Are they worried about him when he's off solving mysteries?
-Wang is asked by the police/military to make note of any websites/e-mail addresses that the scientists he's spying on frequent. So of course, when he sees one playing a weird VR game, instead of reporting it to the authorities...he immediately finds a VR suit and jumps in himself. I mean, I loved the "game" digressions, they were awesome, but I feel like this wasn't the most prudent decision.
-When Commissar Lei talks to Wenjie about the "real purpose" of Red Coast Base, he's ominously pacing on the edge of a cliff. Foreshadowing!
-Declassified documents: "when we send a message to the aliens, we'll use Chinese and Esperanto like good Communists." Hahaha. And then the sharp criticism of the first draft of the "revolutionary" message, "This is utter crap." Not mincing words there.
-Wei Cheng's flashback with the Buddhist abbot. "So you're saying the Buddha doesn't exist? ...Sorry that was rude." "The existence of the Buddha is not a kind of existence you can understand." Good reply.
The way everyone speaks in long infodump flashbacks (Mike Evans also has this problem) reminded me of "The Tenth Muse," which is a book about women in math I read and griped about elsewhere.
-The chapter with the "analog" computer was adapted into "The Circle" which I originally read in an anthology, great alternate-history take. And got me brainstorming about what math-centric SF can look like.
-Wenjie becomes a tyrant like the people who killed her father :( I know it's supposed to be dramatic and ironic, what can I say, it got me in the feelings.
-"Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!" the first thing aliens learn from us is how to overuse exclamation points, good job Trisolarans.
-"Who's her mother?" "I don't know, I was bluffing" hahaha Da Shi
-The American who turns out to be a bad guy (in the sense that he's pro-extinction of the human species) carries around a Peter Singer book, nice touch
-"why do normal people not want to join our awesome cause to totally change or destroy the human species, we just don't know!" but the elites are already alienated
-And then towards the end we have some chapters retelling events from the Trisolarans' point of view. Listener at Post 1379 is originally introduced by almost-verbatim echoes of the chapter where Wenjie receives the message from him, as he receives the Red Coast transmission.
At first his rationale seems to be "I don't want to make contact, because then my job will go out of business and then I'll just die, I guess." (Or reproduce in a Yeerk-like triple.) I find that hard to believe; with Wenjie we've had chapters and chapters leading up to why she is so pessimistic about humanity. Later, his explanation to the prince is "they must be this perfect paradise, they're stable all the time, I want to save this romantic image of a planet I've fallen in love with even if it costs me my life." (Echoing the ETO ideology.) Which is somewhat more believable.
Trisolarans are authoritarian and have to devote everything to the state, Earthlings are weak and decadent, but beautiful. Contrast between China and the West?
Trisolarans measure everything in hours. At first this feels kind of dark (counting one's lifespan in hours? eesh) but then it's like...that makes sense, because they can't have consistent "years" or even "days"!!
Like Andalites, Trisolarans are worried about how fast humans are advancing technology.
So the solution is...we will stop their scientific advancement...with PROTONS. Magic protons that have an eleven-dimensional universe wrapped inside them! "Each proton probably contains an immense amount of wisdom or intelligence, as organized as our universe." "so every time we blow one up in an atom smasher, a whole universe dies?" "yeah, no biggie, it means we shouldn't get sentimental over those stupid Earthlings we're about to annihilate either." I feel like this...is not a good plot device, if every proton is its own multiverse I too am less concerned about the stakes of ours. (But maybe the evil proton-computers are explored more in the next book, so we can see whether or not this is true? I hope.)
"We don't know if Trisolarans have eyes, but probably every intelligent civilization has some kind of eye-image that would be meaningful to them." This stuck out on a reread because I'm working on a story about an intelligent civilization that doesn't really have a visual sense, oops.
"technically the protons are borrowing energy from the end of the universe" do we get to see that too? Apparently the end of the trilogy skips ahead to like, uh, the end of the universe. (Spoilers.)
-"From the Trisolarans' perspective, humans are like bugs" "actually, that's great, do you know how hard bugs are to exterminate? all our skill and force, and they're still thriving." Neat twist.
Anyway, the fic I want to write is a fix it where Yang Dong plays the three-body game. Unfortunately, I'm not very knowledgeable about other great Chinese leaders/scientists/thinkers she might run across, so I'm not sure if I could do a good job with that.
I mentioned before feeling like I'd kind of rushed through, but I think the issue is that the last few chapters aren't quite as strong as the rest, so it's like "did that just happen? really? eh, whatever." I'm hoping that some of those issues will be resolved in the sequels, but those are supposed to be less character-driven and more zoomed-out.
-The first chapter is about a young woman witnessing her father's violent death in the Cultural Revolution. The rest of Part I follows her shifting fortunes politically as she gets on the bad side of the authorities, and rescued thanks to her astrophysics publications. There's very little speculative elements, except for an Ominous Government Antenna Literally And Figuratively Looming Over Everyone.
And yet, it works, it wasn't too bleak or "realistic" for me to give up. I'm wondering whether this is because the Cultural Revolution/Chinese history in general is something I know very little about, so it's novel enough to be engaging? I've read some books (Robert Sawyer is an offender here) that promise SF and eventually get there but not before a lot of unpleasant realism.
-The narrator's voice occasionally zooms out to be like "Historians would later recognize Bai Mulin betraying his comrade under pressure as an important turning point in the history of the human race, although his later life was disappointingly boring for them." Neat (and this kind of narrative zoom-out works better for me than, say, "Too Like the Lightning."
-Allusion to "The Little Match Girl"! I wonder if that's in the original or there was another allusion that Ken Liu "translated" to this one.
-There's a budding romance between scientists Ye Wenjie and Yang Weining, who was once Wenjie's father's student. "Proof" vibes!
-"maybe Yang Dong's childhood made her somewhat autistic" oh, come on
-Wang Miao (the main character in the "present-day" section) has a wife and a six-year-old son but we get very little about them, except that little Dou Dou likes playing with his dad's camera when allowed. Are they worried about him when he's off solving mysteries?
-Wang is asked by the police/military to make note of any websites/e-mail addresses that the scientists he's spying on frequent. So of course, when he sees one playing a weird VR game, instead of reporting it to the authorities...he immediately finds a VR suit and jumps in himself. I mean, I loved the "game" digressions, they were awesome, but I feel like this wasn't the most prudent decision.
-When Commissar Lei talks to Wenjie about the "real purpose" of Red Coast Base, he's ominously pacing on the edge of a cliff. Foreshadowing!
-Declassified documents: "when we send a message to the aliens, we'll use Chinese and Esperanto like good Communists." Hahaha. And then the sharp criticism of the first draft of the "revolutionary" message, "This is utter crap." Not mincing words there.
-Wei Cheng's flashback with the Buddhist abbot. "So you're saying the Buddha doesn't exist? ...Sorry that was rude." "The existence of the Buddha is not a kind of existence you can understand." Good reply.
The way everyone speaks in long infodump flashbacks (Mike Evans also has this problem) reminded me of "The Tenth Muse," which is a book about women in math I read and griped about elsewhere.
-The chapter with the "analog" computer was adapted into "The Circle" which I originally read in an anthology, great alternate-history take. And got me brainstorming about what math-centric SF can look like.
-Wenjie becomes a tyrant like the people who killed her father :( I know it's supposed to be dramatic and ironic, what can I say, it got me in the feelings.
-"Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!" the first thing aliens learn from us is how to overuse exclamation points, good job Trisolarans.
-"Who's her mother?" "I don't know, I was bluffing" hahaha Da Shi
-The American who turns out to be a bad guy (in the sense that he's pro-extinction of the human species) carries around a Peter Singer book, nice touch
-"why do normal people not want to join our awesome cause to totally change or destroy the human species, we just don't know!" but the elites are already alienated
-And then towards the end we have some chapters retelling events from the Trisolarans' point of view. Listener at Post 1379 is originally introduced by almost-verbatim echoes of the chapter where Wenjie receives the message from him, as he receives the Red Coast transmission.
At first his rationale seems to be "I don't want to make contact, because then my job will go out of business and then I'll just die, I guess." (Or reproduce in a Yeerk-like triple.) I find that hard to believe; with Wenjie we've had chapters and chapters leading up to why she is so pessimistic about humanity. Later, his explanation to the prince is "they must be this perfect paradise, they're stable all the time, I want to save this romantic image of a planet I've fallen in love with even if it costs me my life." (Echoing the ETO ideology.) Which is somewhat more believable.
Trisolarans are authoritarian and have to devote everything to the state, Earthlings are weak and decadent, but beautiful. Contrast between China and the West?
Trisolarans measure everything in hours. At first this feels kind of dark (counting one's lifespan in hours? eesh) but then it's like...that makes sense, because they can't have consistent "years" or even "days"!!
Like Andalites, Trisolarans are worried about how fast humans are advancing technology.
So the solution is...we will stop their scientific advancement...with PROTONS. Magic protons that have an eleven-dimensional universe wrapped inside them! "Each proton probably contains an immense amount of wisdom or intelligence, as organized as our universe." "so every time we blow one up in an atom smasher, a whole universe dies?" "yeah, no biggie, it means we shouldn't get sentimental over those stupid Earthlings we're about to annihilate either." I feel like this...is not a good plot device, if every proton is its own multiverse I too am less concerned about the stakes of ours. (But maybe the evil proton-computers are explored more in the next book, so we can see whether or not this is true? I hope.)
"We don't know if Trisolarans have eyes, but probably every intelligent civilization has some kind of eye-image that would be meaningful to them." This stuck out on a reread because I'm working on a story about an intelligent civilization that doesn't really have a visual sense, oops.
"technically the protons are borrowing energy from the end of the universe" do we get to see that too? Apparently the end of the trilogy skips ahead to like, uh, the end of the universe. (Spoilers.)
-"From the Trisolarans' perspective, humans are like bugs" "actually, that's great, do you know how hard bugs are to exterminate? all our skill and force, and they're still thriving." Neat twist.
Anyway, the fic I want to write is a fix it where Yang Dong plays the three-body game. Unfortunately, I'm not very knowledgeable about other great Chinese leaders/scientists/thinkers she might run across, so I'm not sure if I could do a good job with that.
