From the Bookshelf of Niners (io9)…

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)

Liu Cixin,

Ken Liu (Translator)

Start date: November 25, 2014

Finish date: January 6, 2015

Discussion: Books

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last updated May 22, 2014 12:20PM

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Oct 12, 2014 Kaila rated it liked it

Shelves: im-not-saying-its-aliens, first-reads, i-own-this, tor-com, hard-sci-fi, china, 2019, bradbury-house-book-club, video-games

Full of ideas, but not all of them land. It was so interesting to see science fiction put through a Chinese strainer, like all these ideas were almost every sci-fi book I have ever read but twisted in just such a way that they were totally new. We don’t get to see blockbuster movies where the aliens land in Beijing or the meteor hits in the South China Sea. Our media is Western centric. And I mean, I get it, you want your reader to connect to the story and the characters, and the best way to do ...more

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Apr 03, 2017 Benjamin added it

Shelves: bedside-reading, library-borrowed, audiobook

In Whit Stillman's Barcelona, one ex-pat American in Spain explains the benefit of dating Spanish woman to another expat:

You see, that's one of the great things about getting involved with someone from another country. You can't take it personally. What's really terrific is that when we act in ways which might objectively seem asshole-ish or, or, incredibly annoying, they don't get upset at all. They don't take it personally. They just assume it's some national characteristic.

I often think of th In Whit Stillman's Barcelona, one ex-pat American in Spain explains the benefit of dating Spanish woman to another expat:

You see, that's one of the great things about getting involved with someone from another country. You can't take it personally. What's really terrific is that when we act in ways which might objectively seem asshole-ish or, or, incredibly annoying, they don't get upset at all. They don't take it personally. They just assume it's some national characteristic.

I often think of that quote when dealing with literature in translation: if something seems idiosyncratic, is it the author's choice, the translator's choice, or something deeper than a choice--a national (or genre) characteristic that I'm just not aware of?

With that foundational bit of ambiguity, let me say that this is an odd book, made odder (maybe) by the fact that I went in without reading anything about it. I mean: imagine reading the back of a book and it talks about "revolt against dystopia"--then you read the book with that priming, expecting some dystopia and some revolt. But now you read that same book without reading the back--are you meant to look at the dystopia part or the love story part or...

So, when this book opens up with Communist revolutionary torture of intelligentsia, AND then follows a disgraced professor's child as she tries to survive in a rural work unit, AND then fast-forwards 40 years to a nanomaterials researcher, you might be forgiven for not knowing what to look at. It doesn't help that I'm not familiar with Chinese names, which doesn't help the characters stand out.

It probably also doesn't help--or does it?--that I listened to a lot of this while bottle-feeding Henry and that he kept me up for many hours. Also, I didn't sleep much last night, so this review might be a little disjointed.

Though it takes a while, what eventually unfolds is a story about ... well, here's the non-spoilery line and then I'll get spoilery next paragraph... some mysterious deaths in the scientific community and a weird computer game called "Three Body."

OK, now, the spoilers: this is an alien first contact story, with the threat of invasion and questions of loyalty to the human race / the morality of civilization. It is paced oddly, some of the characters are a little broad (the out-of-the-box and socially crude police officer, the nerdy physicists, etc.), and it is full of infodumps. (The aliens apparently send a whole long message with all of their plans, which is odd considering that they want to destroy us. Or maybe this will be revealed to be false in the next book?)

And yet, for it's many faults, there's a breadth of invention and scope here that will thrill hard science fiction fans, and also a central focus on a human story of betrayal and revenge that kept my attention throughout.

So I'm not sure why this book is so odd from my frame of reference--the author, the translator, Chinese science fiction, or China tout court--but it's also a very interesting book. ...more

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Dec 04, 2014 Brian rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobooks

There's a lot going on here. I really enjoyed this book. Some of the ideas in it will stick with me for a long time. This is the first time I've read a genre book that was translated from Chinese, and it was a little bit clunky. There were a few times where a word was used to describe something, and I wondered if it was the correct one, and then I wondered what it was actually talking about. And then there were a few times where the writing itself was a little clunky, but not because of the tran ...more

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