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 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.
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.
You nailed it. That's the part I could not swallow.
But I'll give Sirens another try. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
[EDIT] the action writing in Blindsight is particularly good, in fact. Some of the best I've read.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I _love_ Blindsight.
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.
Where would you recommend someone start with Adrian Tchaikovsky?
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.
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.