Three Body Problem -- Arghhhh!

[lydy]

So, anybody else really unhappy with this much touted novel? Finished it today, and am so very frustrated. It doesn't go below No Award, but really, I was hoping for so much better.

Will talk to anyone who wants to talk in comments. Spoilers a-ok in comments.

Arghhh.

Comments

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The one thing I did take from the novel is that my understanding of the Cultural Revolution is vasty insufficient. I mean, I knew it was wide, deep, weird, traumatizing, and incomprehensible. What I didn't understand was how incredibly huge and incomprehensible it is. I now have huge new vistas of "I just don't understand" that I did not have before. And that is very interesting. And distressing.

The ending? Oh my gods, I'm annoyed. I haven't been this annoyed at a ending since Atwood's _A Handmaid's Tale_ which I hated for many, many reasons, but the ending brought it all home.

And did I say, "Arghhh"? Oh, I did, didn't I? Well, arghh again.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I sort of hated the video game, but otherwise I just thought it promised more than it delivered. The cultural revolution stuff was fine but that was actually historical-novel -- all the SF was much less good. A bit pedestrian and really throwing back to golden age type stuff rather than more recent SF ideas.

Overall it's neck and neck for me with The Goblin Emperor, another novel I had major problems with. Both well above No Award. Still haven't read Ancillary Sword, but kind of don't want to vote for it anyway because I believe in spreading these things around.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I hated, hated, hated the video game. I'm generally a hard-sell on non-real-world narrative in fiction. I hate dream sequences and the like, they're usually a waste of time, and an author's lazy way of adding resonance out of air. But worse than that, the video game WASN'T A GAME! There's no game play. There's no reason, as far as I can tell, for the game to require a full VR suit. There's no real action that anyone can take. There's very little interaction that anyone has with either the other players or the game elements. Mostly, the player just stands around and watches. It's pure info dump, and graceless.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I Have A Theory
Yes, the Cultural Revolution was a monumental catastrophe. And personally, I still can't completely trust the former members of our [i.e., United States] domestic Chairman Mao Fan Club. (I used to know the page numbers of the most mind-bogglingly authoritarian bits in the little red book. From all over the "political spectrum" people work to forget that Mao was a Stalinist.)
Mao conquered China. Even taking it from such a corrupt, useless bunch as the Kuomintang was an epic achievement. It's been done only a handful of times in all history.
I suspect he didn't realize that would be the easy part. Cause then he set about to re-make China. Hundred Flowers, Great Leap, etc. China remains China. The last and most extreme effort was the Cultural Revolution. My hypothesis is that he was just totally FRUSTRATED.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

You are probably right, but I find Mao rather uninteresting. What I wish I had a handle on is how it felt to live through that convulsion. From the ground level, it must have been chaotic, cruel, and unreasoning. And I think it must have left scars that I don't understand nor can I map. The rationale behind it was probably not all that interesting to the people caught in the jaws of the horror.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I tend to imagine it was a lot like living through The Terror in Paris, only cubed and squared. Not least because Chinese modes of execution seem to have always been so much more, er, creative, than Madame la Guillotine.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I very much recommend Jung Chang's Wild Swans on this topic.

[huladav8usa.livejournal.com]

And I thought this'd be about GO SET A WATCHMAN. (Joking!)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I have never read _To Kill a Mockingbird_. I don't generally like Southern Fiction, and nothing I've heard particularly intrigues me. I did hear a radio program on _Go Set a Watchman_ this morning, and it still doesn't really sound like my thing.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I got bogged down in the video game, and I probably won't bother trying to finish it.

I agree about the vividness and horror of the real world part about the Cultural Revolution-- fictional dystopias are much less intense.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The video game is horrible.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

I'd like to like it, but I'm bouncing really hard off of the infodump portions (or at least what looks like infodumps to me), so I put it down, and I've somehow managed to avoid picking it up again.

I have my votes in for the Hugos, and it is above No Award - something that isn't true for all of the nominees (I'll admit that resentment over some of the dreck nominees I ended up reading last year very much influenced this year's votes).

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I'm perfectly comfortable using No Award as a way of protesting the slate. There are a very few Puppy nominations which have gotten sufficient good reviews that I may read them and then rank them below No Award. The rest, I will not rank, as I will not read them. Although I do wish there was a special hell to which I could consign _Wisdom of My Internets_.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I was decidedly meh about it, yeah. I found the passages inside the game pretty tedious. The ending, well, it pretty clearly marks the book as part of a trilogy -- it's not really an ending at all. But really what I found least satisfying about the book was the overall lack of emotional affect. The various characters feel disconnected, almost disembodied: cool, remote, untouched. In Ye it's understandable, indeed necessary to her character or she would never have betrayed her entire species, but all the others feel that way to me too. Whatever emoting they do seems rote, and unfelt.

In some ways, I found the passages about the Cultural Revolution the most involving -- being historical, they had a more lived-in feel than the rest. The period was certainly bloodier than I realized, but that, as far as I can tell, is true of virtually any period in Chinese history you might want to name. I'm currently reading Autumn In the Heavenly Kingdom, a history of the Taiping Rebellion that integrates the Western and Chinese takes on events, and holy cow, that was huge. The largest civil conflict ever waged on the planet, and if you hear about it in school it's a bare mention as you trundle through the tedium of US 19th C. history.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that lack of emotional affect is, in part, also a legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Are there entire generations of Chinese suffering from PTSD? But yeah, hard to relate to any of the people. When Ye kills her husband and her boss, her lack of emotion seems very odd. And her relationship to her daughter is...it seems badly drawn. There should be more or less emotion, more or less involvement, somehow.

The various suicides. I kinda skimmed the last 10% of the novel, but I assume they were because the scientists were getting scary irrational results because of the intelligent protons? That seems weird and wrong, too. I mean, one guy whose entire theory of the universe goes up in smoke, sure, but a rash? And I believe some Westerners not just Chinese? How does that even work? Emotionally, I mean.

The two side of the Trisolarian fan club seem to be unrealistically monolithic. There should have been more factions, more complexity. The author is right, the advent of a new intelligent species would be transformative. But people are, I think, far weirder than he is giving them credit for.

[soon_lee]

I have read a (very) limited number of Chinese fiction in translation and that lack of emotional affect is not uncommon, so that didn't bother me.

The middle sagged but I did enjoy the beginning & the end. My main problem with it was that it dropped me out of the narrative too many times to deserve my top spot:
- the scientists suiciding was not believable.
- the monomolecular wire sequence had my eyes rolling
- the etching of circuitry onto a proton I don't believe is theoretically possible.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, all those suicides seemed implausible to me. Some, yes, maybe, but especially among younger scientists, of a certain personality type, I would expect a wider variety of responses, including digging in and declaring, "I am going to figure this shit out!" And yep, yep, the Trisolaran fifth column much too cohesive and simplistic in structure -- especially ironic in a book that starts off with the outright battles between various competing factions of Red Guards. You'd expect a comparable mess of the Trisolaran People's Front warring with the People's Front of Trisolaris, all bagging on the Popular Front of Trisolaris, Synod of 1856, and so on. Not to mention sub-factions by national origin. So yeah, weirder than that.

And yeah, the implausibility of an intelligent species arising on Trisolaris at all, let alone somehow restarting civilization over and over, under conditions when the planetary surface is periodically burned to a cinder, intruded from time to time.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Can anybody speak to the Big Science part of the book? I mean the physics Big Science, not the biological Big Science. The biological bit seems utterly unrealistic and unreasonable. But rolling out a proton, writing on it, turning it into an intelligent being, rolling it back up, and sending it off to do one's bidding -- does any of that make any sense at all? Is the structure of a proton in any way that complex? Temporarily assuming one can redimension it, is there any reason to think you could, you know, imprint a circuit on it, and if you could, wouldn't that fundamentally change the structure of the proton? Aren't they doing it by moving about mesons and nuclear forces? Why would it roll back up again, after you'd messed with it? And what is powering the computer? And how come they can write artificial intelligences? We can't, aren't even close, and they just do it *bam*, out of the blue?

And a niggling annoyance: what the hell is a "Trisolarian hour"? Why hour? Of what is it comprised? How do they measure time, what with their solar system being all chaotic?

Oh, and back to the biology, why do they only have two sexes? Oh, the biology. Arghhh.

[jiawen]

I'm working my way through a Taiwanese edition of it (in Mandarin). I'm only on page 77. I'll let you know how I fare when I'm done, probably sometime long after the Hugos are decided. :)

(One big difference seems to be that the Chinese version starts with Wang Miao; he goes all the way to meeting Ye Wenjie before the section about her starts. I don't know if this is particular to the Taiwanese edition, or to the original version, or what; it seems like the English version starts with Ye Wenjie, no?)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The English version starts out with various snippets from the Revolution, culminating with the death of Ye Wenjie's father. It's amazing, vivid, and horrid. Alas, I think it unbalances the book. None of the fiction has the power and presence of the historical fact.

[jiawen]

Just to make sure: the section with Ye Wenjie and her father are historical fiction, not fact. Not sure if that's what you meant...? Those kinds of horrors were all too common in the Cultural Revolution, but that particular thing didn't actually happen.

Hmm, I wonder why the copy I have starts with Wang Miao? From this page , it looks like the Mainland edition also starts with Wang Miao, implying that the English edition is rearranged. I wonder what the decision was there. I just wrote an email to Ken Liu to inquire -- I'll post more if he responds.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Um, you are right, and I wrote sloppily. I think that the historical fiction unbalances the book because the historical fiction has so much more power and weight than the science fiction.

(I am hoping that responding to this takes it out of moderation.)

[jiawen]

Hmm, maybe. It might have lighter impact to someone who grew up with talk about the Cultural Revolution around them. And apparently it was the third volume of the series that really got people hooked.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Also, I'll be fascinated to know what Ken Liu says, if he answers. Thank you.

[jiawen]

He responded almost immediately! He basically just pointed me to this Q&A thread, where Liu said:

The translation follows the Chinese original pretty exactly, other than the fact that some chapters have been shifted around from their order in the original publication. The content was almost all preserved, though some repetitive technical bits were eliminated in the second half of the book.

So indeed the chapter order changed. Maybe too late to try re-reading it to see if a different chapter order produces a different effect.


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[lydy.livejournal.com]

Unspam!

I need to look at my LJ settings. Not that I know where to do that, but whatevs.

[jiawen]

I just posted a response that got marked as spam. Perhaps because I linked to a Chinese-language webpage?

[jiawen]

Another response got labeled as spam -- looks like any comment with a link in it gets marked that way.