The Three Body Problem is officially the most overrated book on Hacker News. I am trying to understand why. It has no soul, the "science" is garbage, not a single character is memorable, it's way, way too long for what it is.

It's a sci-fi book with an impressive sense of scale. Every hundred pages or so the story zooms out; from one man's life, to a country's struggle, to a global calamity, to an interplanetary and then galactic crisis, and finally to even higher dimensions.

It does this while threading characters from each stage of "zoom" into future stages, creating for a lot of interesting cross-over plots and sub-plots.

As other commentator's have said, it also wove together Chinese culture with science fiction and history with drama very fluidly.

It was, for me personally, a very "fun" read. Kept me excited at each chapter, and I genuinely didn't know what to expect next. I highly recommend to any sci-fi fans out there, even those like me, who initially didn't think they could stomach around 1,000 pages of a translated-from-Chinese sci-fi novel.

> It's a sci-fi book with an impressive sense of scale

Which is not really new. The three books could be condensed a lot. It felt like reading the Dune prequels and sequels: useless details not advancing any plot just to make the book bigger.

It may come from the difference between western and Chinese ways to tell a story. Or the translator job. But they were snooze-fest for 300 pages then 10 pages of something happening then back to boring.

I would mostly agree, but having lived in China and studied Chinese for several years the element of Chinese culture and history intermingled with sci-fi made it a lot more intriguing to me. Also, it was a great way to practice reading Chinese.

Eh? It reads like a book translated into Chinese. It's probably one of the most not-Chinese Chinese books you can read.

Which makes it an easy first book for a beginner.

I mostly agree but I still enjoyed the story, at least until book 2, the ending of book 3 was horrendous. For the "soul" I gave it the benefit of the doubt, maybe Chinese writing different from western writing or something get lost in translation. For the characters I don't know if it's them or me dealing with Chinese names, I get lost playing games like shogun total war because of this.

I'm reading Shuǐ hǔ Zhuàn right now, there are 108 heroes along the ~2000 pages but somehow the most important remain memorable enough: Gao Chai, Song Jiang, Li Kui, Wu Gong...

See, I can even remember some names :)

Extremely pleased to find I'm not the only person to think so.

Ditto. I found the trilogy to be incredibly over-hyped. The "science" was essentially just inventing ridiculous things to make the story work. The plot started off alright, but by the end of the 2nd / beginning of the 3rd book, it really went downhill.

I thought that policeman was memorable

>It has no soul

Non-arguments like this make me actually want to check it out.

Probably because of the dark forest idea which gives a satisfying answer to the Fermi Paradox.

That "idea" has been around since the 1980s.

Seeing as we're discussing sci-fi, the super predator theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...) is explored in the excellent Revelation Space trilogy. This series takes a lot less liberties with known physics as well.

Edit: I see you linked to the wrong sub-section there. However, overall the contrast between super-predator theory and (self-)annihilation is a bit more complex than one would think. They're not entirely binary.

On one hand, the self-annihilation idea implies that super-predator civilizations, being extremely rate to exist, would not have strong motivations for exterminating competitors.

What would possibly be the need, given the vastness of time and space, and the thermodynamic arguments given? Indeed, following this logic, the extraordinarily rare galactic survivor civilizations are almost guaranteed a long, peaceful existence.

On the other hand, it all develops on the curve of the galactic gaussian justifying possible pre-emptive defense investments. There's a difference of 3-4 or n sigmas statistics likelihood. In the former case, the likelihood of a rare rival emerging is high enough that pre-emptive defense strategies will be considered, and rudimentary systems of deterrence put in place. In the (high) n theory, it probably would not. How a civilization in the early stages of hegemony determined this fact, would be an interesting and possible civilization-saving (or destroying) feat....

Side note, haven't heard of the Revelation Space trilogy. Does it offer a workable theory for the origins of the predator dynamic?

> Side note, haven't heard of the Revelation Space trilogy. Does it offer a workable theory for the origins of the predator dynamic?

Not really, it's doesn't get any philosophical treatment and is more of a plot device. Without giving away spoilers it's more a bit like iRobot (the movie) with the predator having noble but extremely long term goals of what's best for life itself, I don't think why it does this really holds up either but it works as a plot device. It's happy with intelligent life as long as it doesn't expand into the galaxy, it doesn't act preemptively.

> On the other hand, it all develops on the curve of the galactic gaussian justifying possible pre-emptive defense investments. There's a difference of 3-4 or n sigmas statistics likelihood.

The other factor is the cost to put down potential rivals, in the dark forest universe this cost is incredibly cheap. If the cost were a lot higher then the outcome would be very different.

One thing that especially irked me about Liu was how contingent so many plot points were on specifics, and how little attention was paid to that.

E.g. If there were no FTL travel, deterrence would look very different. Especially if the average time for a civilization to become multi-planetary < the average distance to the nearest annihilation capable civilization

When I saw that URL I thought you were linking to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...

which I think is the most memorable and haunting section title of an encyclopedia article ever written.

> Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem

His vision of the future is bleak in the extreme. His characters are naively constructed and occasionally make incomprehensible choices.

The worst sin is he's unsure whether he wants to write hard sci-fi or just mostly "fi" with a thin veneer of "sci". Occasionally he seems like he wants to stick to solid science with a few extra assumptions (in the best tradition of hard sci-fi); but then he veers off into some cartoonish "science" that's quite jarring. In the end, you get the impression he just tries to brag about how much science he "understands".

In the end I was reading it the way some folks watch a bad movie - to make fun of it.

If you want cosmic scale hard sci-fi, try Stephen Baxter. He can be a bit dry at times, but that's his only fault.

Personally, I actually liked the ideas, but everything else was a complete disaster.

The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel. There's zero depth to any characters. By modern standards, it's all "tell", no "show". I've read several reviews that suggest this is actually how most modern Chinese novels are written. That doesn't make it more readable, unfortunately.

The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal. My sense after reading was that I had just been reading Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" but without any of the humour. Many of Vonnegut's books are breezy, somewhat outrageous fables that don't go very deep into their characters, of course, but they work because they're funny, colourful, inventive, well written, and are full of great ideas. I think Lui Cixin's book would have worked much better as a Vonnegut-style satire.

If you want a similarly dark look at the future of humanity's role in the universe, take a look at Peter Watts' Blindsight [1]. While it certainly won't win any prizes for literature, and it has some odd quirks, it's considerably better written, and might especially appeal to fans of Neal Stephenson's loose, ragged style of writing. Moreover, it's probably the creepiest sci-fi novel I've read. On the surface it's a somewhat straightforward story about a team of transhuman specialists who are dispatched to investigate an apparently alien artifact. But it goes deep into some fairly cynical ideaas about human consciousness that are somewhat existentially unnerving.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Firefall-Book-Peter-Watts-...

> The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel.

> The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal.

This might be an artifact of translation, combined with whatever cultural differences there are between Chinese literature and the "Western" literature (scare quotes because the category is loosely defined). The style actually seemed somewhat poetic to me. I'm just not knowledgeable enough in this neighborhood to pass judgment.

But I agree that the style doesn't connect with the substance of the book, mostly because the substance is disjointed and so uneven.

Blindsight is fairly bleak as well. At least Stephenson is unabashedly optimistic. Peter Watts is echoing there some very important debates in philosophy and neuroscience these days - Thomas Nagel's "what is it like to be something", David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, p-zombies, the skepticism of Dan Dennett, etc. The problem of consciousness in general. Blindsight is great as a sneaky introduction to these concepts, even though it's quite cynical, as you've said.

I've never connected well with Vonnegut, actually. But then I didn't really connect either with hugely popular authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. Maybe there's a pattern there.

Vonnegut is definitely in the same camp as Adams and Pratchett. I like to think that Adams was influenced by Vonnegut in his own writing, as Sirens could easily have passed for a Douglas Adams novel if it'd had more jokes and a bit more Britishness.

One thing Adams and Vonnegut have in common is their almost nihilistic sense of cosmic absurdity and the futility of purpose. Without spoiling anything, the whole story in The Sirens of Titan turns out to be meaningless. A bit like how, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we eventually realize that Earth was originally created by little white, superintelligent mice to compute, over billions of years, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. (The answer isn't... terribly useful.) It's absurd, and funny, and sad at the same time.

Vonnegut got more eccentric in his writing over time, but Sirens is actually very straightforward, and it's a masterpiece. Give it a shot. Cat's Cradle is also excellent. I never liked Slaughterhouse Five, which everyone recommends, as much.

> almost nihilistic sense of cosmic absurdity and the futility of purpose

You nailed it. That's the part I could not swallow.

But I'll give Sirens another try. Thank you.

Second the recommendation for Blindsight. It's competently written (I don't mean that as faint praise) and has a darkness to it that's substantial enough to stick with you for a good long while.

You're right that the prose is a little Stephenson-ish, but to avoid giving anyone the wrong impression I'd add that the pace, story, structure, and—how to put this?—evenness of quality aren't.

Agreed, the pacing was great, and he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi. The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive.

> he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi

The only persistent offender here I can think of is Stephenson. Who else are you thinking of?

BTW, many years ago I used to hate Stephenson's dry style. But for some reason I kept reading his books because I like his ideas. Eventually I figured what he's really like - just a different attitude - and at that point I started to enjoy his writing quite a lot. Anathem is one of my favorite books in all literature, ever.

> The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive.

Yeah, that was boring.

Hm, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and Terry Pratchett come to mind.

William Gibson, although I liked Neuromancer's ending, and every novel since that has followed the same template (mystery bigwig hires someone to find McGuffin, but is really manipulating/being manipulated about something else, the end).

Maybe I was being harsh. I'll see if I can think of more examples.

At the other end of the scale, Iain M. Banks never wrote a badly paced book that didn't have a perfect ending, as far as I'm concerned. The guy was a master.

Gibson's books clicked for me where I read an interview in which he claimed Idoru was his favorite. (Though this was before his newer stuff)

I finally realized his enjoyment is in Type B writing. It's the detail next to the main plot, rather than the motion itself.

Which parallels what I like about film noir -- it's not about finding the murderer: it's about watching the characters find the murderer.

Which is why I maintain the Lost ending was hilarious. JJ Abrams essentially said "Look, you didn't really care about the answers: you cared about watching these characters look for answers. And in the end, it's the characters who mattered." Which is probably not something you should ever point out to a TV geek if you want to keep your head intact. ;)

Gibson is incredible at conjuring up his environments. On the other hand, his prose is also second to none, usually.

All that said, just imagine how fantastic his novels could be with better plotting! He's not terrible at characters, it's the plot that ultimately disappoint. I think his imagination peaked with Neuromancer, unfortunately; his later novels didn't bring much new to the table beyond what he's laid out in that book, and I find his later obsession with art (like the locational VR art in the Blue Ant trilogy) and video games tiresome. His newest one didn't click for me at all.

Lost, ugh. Such a promising start completely wasted by lack of planning.

> The only persistent offender here I can think of is Stephenson. Who else are you thinking of?

Peter F. Hamilton.

He has some awesome universes but his endings are usually a lot fo Deus Ex Machina. But the thoughts of MorningLightMountain analyzing a human is a good example of how he can get some alien concepts done.

+1 for Anathem. I re-read it about every 18 months. The dry humor is fantastic. Also, monks in space!

I guess I'm the only one who thought Blindsight's prose was delicious from front to back, then? I can see why people would think it's a little overdone, but I like that about it as well.

Oh, no, the prose was fine. Did my post come off like I don't like the prose in Blindsight? I just didn't want anyone to think anything else about the book was similar to Stephenson's work at all—for one thing, Blindsight has an entire story that's fully plotted beginning to end, not just a bunch of amazing ideas and great first third that proceeds to go nowhere.

[EDIT] the action writing in Blindsight is particularly good, in fact. Some of the best I've read.

You actually hit on the point when you say it was 'unintentionally surreal' - you can probably lose the 'unintentionally'. It has a report-like 'stranger than fiction' quality that works very well for the novel I think, as if it is a declassified communist era file. It never lets up, never once winks at you. Contrast say "Use of Weapons" by Ian Banks - I just read this before "Death's End". This is a good book, lauded as one of the best Culture novels. Reading it you can sit back and think oh that's a nice metaphor, and I like how allegory is used here, and the pastiche of advanced technology and primitive human war is very interesting, and this unreliable double narrative structure running backwards and forwards in time is extremely clever. But when you read it you can sense it is being written for you, it lacks sufficient strangeness to induce a sense of wonder. I was no where near as riveted or interested in what was going on as I was with the 3 body books, I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen next.

I certainly enjoy literary books, but I think describing the style and tone of Liu's books as simple and juvenile is missing the point a bit.

No, I do think it's accidental. Or at least not intended the way I read it.

It's surreal in the sense that the writer asks you accept certain developments at face value, just as it asks its characters to. If it had been a satire, then it would have perhaps been able to reach the heights of Vonnegut, Lem or Adams. But everything seems like it is meant sincerely, without irony. The wooden main characters run around like chess pieces with little or no inner life, just to fulfill the necessities of the next scene. The book lacks realism -- not in the sense of being realistic against our world, but in the sense that it's a fable, told like a children's story, yet seemingly marketed to adults. You kind of have to brace yourself a bit, as a reader, because it's told in the way an adult might speak to a slow child, which feels condescending. I don't want to be told how a character thinks or feels.

There's nothing wrong with the story, per se (although I have issues with some things, like the nanotech at the end of the book, which comes as a huge deus ex machina -- it asks the reader to accept too much in terms of technological plausibility). The story is interesting. It's just told in a completely ridiculous way.

Regarding Use of Weapons, I don't completely disagree. Unlike a lot of people, I don't think it's Banks' best work. I do think it's the superior book by far. I can forgive Banks for being playful about narrative forms even though it's a gimmick that doesn't elevate the story in any way (at least for me).

> it's told in the way an adult might speak to a slow child, which feels condescending. I don't want to be told how a character thinks or feels.

OMG, this. So much this.

> If it had been a satire, then it would have perhaps been able to reach the heights of Vonnegut, Lem or Adams.

Unsurprisingly given my stated preferences, the only book by Lem I truly enjoyed was Solaris. And when I say enjoyed I mean it was a huge, near-mystical experience (well, I was a teenager).

The faux-encyclopedic style, I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean it in an ironic sense, does he? Seems more similar to Borges in a way. I re-read it recently and again it seemed a completely sincere book. He just opened up the floodgates for everything that mattered to him, affairs of the heart and of the mind also.

Solaris is somewhat satiric, but it's subtle. After that long, encyclopedic summary of solarisist research that spans decades (or is it a whole century? I forget), the protagonist tells us everyone has developed their own theory about Solaris, and every single theory is wrong, because it ultimately reflects the mind of the theorizer. Then, ironically, the protagonist tells us his theory. Lem is deeply cynical here about humankind's ability to understand anything outside themselves. It's a pretty overt critique of modern academia, perhaps especially the soft sciences like psychology and psychiatry. It's not meant to be a very emotional novel, I think. Lem hated the movies, which misinterpreted his intentions and honed in on the love story aspect.

Did you read Lem's His Master's Voice? It goes even beyond Solaris in that way. It's about the infighting, political maneuvering etc. that surround an attempt to decipher what may or may not be an extraterrestrial signal. It's perhaps a bit drier than Solaris, being written as a memoir by one of the scientists involved.

I'd say Lem had two modes of writing. He wrote comic adventure stories like the Pirx stories and The Cyberiad. And he wrote ironic, somewhat cynical or pessimistic criticisms of science, such as Solaris, HMV and The Futurological Congress. The latter is great -- during a scientific conference on the future of human civilization, the drinking water is poisoned with psychedelics drugs, and the main character a future dystopia. It's a short, fun book. Cynical, but fun.

His other novels, such as Eden and Fiasco, reflect this view. He's never struck me as a fan of humankind.

I'm not sure I see much of a Borges connection, other than the fictitious history of Solaris.

Have you read any of the Strugatskys' books? They're like anti-Lem's -- lot more optimistic and unabashedly humanist, I think. Roadside Picnic is a great start, but they wrote a bunch of great novels. Beetle in the Anthill is one of my favorites.

Hm, I still don't see Solaris that way - satiric, I mean. Quite aware of the limits of our knowledge, definitely. A dash of transcendental, a la The Kid by the Strugatsky's (the English version of the title, 'Space Mowgli', is an abomination), or Childhood's End by A.C. Clarke. I feel he says, look at all this flood of mind stuff, and what do we get for it? Finally he's standing on the shore, at the end of knowledge, and he's touching the vast unknown ocean in front of him - very symbolic.

The love story is definitely not the main thread, but I felt it was very personal. Not sure why. Kelvin is Lem, no doubt about it, and he poured into the book some measure of his soul. I didn't catch that when I was 16, but I felt it quite powerfully a few months ago when I re-read it.

The contemplative atmosphere of the movie by Soderbergh seemed to capture some of the spirit of the book, but it would take a heck of a lot of text to explain why. But that was it, it didn't capture much else.

I didn't read much else by Lem - the Cyberiad and some Pirx stuff, but that's about it and it was long ago and I don't remember much. Nothing felt as meaningful as Solaris to me.

I didn't read many books by the Strugatskys, but those I've read are awesome.

wow, love that author biography on amazon! I like his chutzpah.

> This is awkward and a little creepy. They tell me I have to do it for promotional purposes, but I've already got a blog. I've already got a website. Being told that setting up an author page on fcuking Amazon is essential to success? A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn't even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more? That just sucks the one-eyed purple trouser eel.

> Still, here I am. But if you're really all that interested, go check out my actual blog/website. Google is not your friend (any more than Amazon is), but at least it'll point you in the right direction.

Peter Watts is great. I've very much enjoyed all of his books.

I _love_ Blindsight.

I'm completely with you. It baffles me how many people loved Liu Cixin's book. It's written like a 70's era 'ideas, no execution' sci-fi novel, but the ideas are terrible. I mean, the central 'xeno-anthropology' thing, that's treated as like a deeply profound maths proof, is kinda a brain fart.

If you read a writer like Peter Tchaikovsky, you get actually interesting ideas, and really good execution. And I'd say PT is pretty mid-range for contemporary sci-fi authors. People like Yoon Ha Lee or China Mieville are really pushing the genre forward. Lui Cixin's work on the other hand reads like one of those 70's books about uplifted dolphins and sexy spacewomen, all robotic characterization and uninspired writing.

I think you mean Adrian Tchaikovsky, right? Peter was a great composer of music, but not SF.

Where would you recommend someone start with Adrian Tchaikovsky?

Yeah - oh man, I'm terrible with names. Adrian Tchaikovsky's a really good execution guy - fantastic standalone novels, not with anything especially out there, but really well done. I was really impressed by The Freeze Frame Revolution, and Children of Time was also good. His fantasy stuff is pretty uninspired, though.

> It baffles me how many people loved Liu Cixin's book.

If this is the first sci-fi book you read, and especially if this happens at an early-ish age, I imagine it may seem impressive.

How funny, a friend recommended it to me last week and I just started reading it yesterday. I'm only in the beginning, but I must say I really like it so far.

It starts with a horrifying dive into '60s Revolutionary China, then veers off into an extremely surreal and nerdy anime plot, and proceeds on a very cool and foreboding sci-fi arc (I think; I don't remember how much of the sci-fi it has vs. how much of it is in the two sequels).

That's a good way to put it. The novel series manages to have 1) brilliant and highly imaginative set-piece sci-fi events 2) ruminations on the possibly dark nature of humanity in space 3) amateurish characters - save two or three 4) universal-scale scope 5) awareness of just 6 countries in the world : all at the same time.

And a lame ending compared to the rest of the trilogy. It's like in the last 50 pages he run out of ideas.

In his defense, he explored quite a bit.

I really had kind of hoped to get a glimpse into what he'd have come up with for if the universe restarted.

Ending is hard, and when it comes to sci-fi series it empirically looks impossible: I can't remember a single one whose end wasn't disappointing.

I was going to say something similar about the Xeelee stories (I also love the The Three Body Problem) but remembered that humanity in those stories only manages to have weaponized neutron stars in a feeble attempt to fight the Xeelee.

> events that don't truly unfold until far into the story

Aka "the last 100 pages, where something actually happens."

I really enjoyed the trilogy, some clever and original stuff there. I didn't enjoy the third book so much, but don't want to spoil anything.