Cixin Liu's trilogy-opening novel about first contact with aliens and the clandestine struggle with them over Earth's future, and its scientific progress in particular.
Quite a lot of material in this book and a lot of it was foreign for a foreigner.The Cultural revolution and the potential psychological damage that could do to those who lived through it or fought on each side was intense. As the book planed out the character development of the main parties was thorough enough to understand. The science was well spoken even if I can't verify the validity of it, it felt right. Thank goodness for all the footnotes or I'd never have pieced together all the Chinese references.
A little bit of a challenge but a good amount of enjoyment reading this. The author has a good pulse on some of the psychosis of human nature. I have some qualms with how the Trisolorans are portrayed but a re-read might make me feel different. It's a lot to wrap your head around what an alien culture might …
Quite a lot of material in this book and a lot of it was foreign for a foreigner.The Cultural revolution and the potential psychological damage that could do to those who lived through it or fought on each side was intense. As the book planed out the character development of the main parties was thorough enough to understand. The science was well spoken even if I can't verify the validity of it, it felt right. Thank goodness for all the footnotes or I'd never have pieced together all the Chinese references.
A little bit of a challenge but a good amount of enjoyment reading this. The author has a good pulse on some of the psychosis of human nature. I have some qualms with how the Trisolorans are portrayed but a re-read might make me feel different. It's a lot to wrap your head around what an alien culture might be thinking.
I am eagerly awaiting a translation of Dark Forest to continue learning what happens.
A multiple award-winning science fiction book set in China and translated from Chinese? That sounds like a perfect book for me.The book starts with the story of woman whose father is killed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. She is sentenced to reeducation but eventually her training as a physicist is determined to be desirable for a new military project. She is sent to live and work on a base with a large radio antenna.In the present day, there is a wave of murders and suicides of scientists in China. A man who is researching ways to make fabric from nanoparticles finds that whenever he takes a picture there is a clock embedded in the image. The clock is counting down. He doesn't know what is going to happen when the countdown ends. He is contacted and told to stop his research and the countdown will stop. It does.He …
A multiple award-winning science fiction book set in China and translated from Chinese? That sounds like a perfect book for me.The book starts with the story of woman whose father is killed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. She is sentenced to reeducation but eventually her training as a physicist is determined to be desirable for a new military project. She is sent to live and work on a base with a large radio antenna.In the present day, there is a wave of murders and suicides of scientists in China. A man who is researching ways to make fabric from nanoparticles finds that whenever he takes a picture there is a clock embedded in the image. The clock is counting down. He doesn't know what is going to happen when the countdown ends. He is contacted and told to stop his research and the countdown will stop. It does.He knew a few of the dead scientists. When visiting the husband of one he is surprised to see a set up for a video game called Three Body. The dead scientist didn't seem like the kind of person who would enjoy a game. He decides to play it to see what it is like. The game is set on a planet where day and night are not set lengths. They can't be predicted. In times of extreme cold or heat, civilizations on the planet collapse. The game then restarts in a different period of time and the goal is the same. Try to predict the movement of the sun.People who like and are good at this game tend to be scientists and intellectuals. Once they pass a certain level they are contacted for meetups. There they are told that the world in the game is real and that aliens from that planet are on their way to Earth.What I didn't realize when I got this book is that it is more about physics than anything else. Most of the main characters are theoretical physicists and the book is mostly them talking to each other about their research.I'm not good with physics. I had to take a few classes in college and I hated it. Here's my hangup. When they start talking about things like, "We'll smash these particles together and if something bounces back in this direction then we'll know that there was this type of particle there." My brain says, "No you don't. You assume that what bounced your particle back was another particle because you are thinking in particles. But you can't see it. You don't know what it is. There could be a force that you don't know about that is repelling particles. For all you know, there could be a tiny elf with a mirror reflecting particles. It could be anything. You don't know!" Yeah, I'm a biology girl. I want to actually see what is going on. When this book got into discussions of what would happen if you unfold a proton in 2 or 1 or 6 dimensions ... ugh.I had to step back from the details of this book to look at the main questions.
Has humanity become so depraved that you would welcome an alien invasion? You don't know if they will coexist, destroy humanity, or change humanity. Do you care?
Can you cripple a society if you make it sufficiently afraid of scientific investigation? This one is interesting to me because I read so much about anti-intellectualism in the United States. (Despite my physics rant in the paragraph above, I think investigating basic sciences is extremely important because there is so much that we don't know.)
An interesting part of the translation of this novel is the fact that so much of it is based in Chinese history and philosophy. There are some footnotes to explain the mindset of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese philosophers to English-reading audiences. There is Chinese wordplay that is explained too. I appreciated that because it helped but it is also a little embarrassing that they knew we would need the help. There are parts of the game where western historical figures are brought in. I wonder if there were footnotes in the Chinese version to explain them.
I had a bit of trouble reading this book. Some of it maybe due to it being translated from Chinese. Some of my issues may be cultural differences. It takes a long time for the plot to unfold, the story is told in a not quite chronological order because there are different perspectives that only come to light when someone gets to tell their story.
The story starts with the Cultural Revolution in China and ends sometime in the near future. The main character is a physicist named Wang who is working on nano materials. But a lot of prologue has to be told before he can enter the story. And then his character stays curiously flat to me.
What I liked about the book is the "grand idea" the construct that ties everything together, even if it only appears to the reader sometime in the last third of the …
I had a bit of trouble reading this book. Some of it maybe due to it being translated from Chinese. Some of my issues may be cultural differences. It takes a long time for the plot to unfold, the story is told in a not quite chronological order because there are different perspectives that only come to light when someone gets to tell their story.
The story starts with the Cultural Revolution in China and ends sometime in the near future. The main character is a physicist named Wang who is working on nano materials. But a lot of prologue has to be told before he can enter the story. And then his character stays curiously flat to me.
What I liked about the book is the "grand idea" the construct that ties everything together, even if it only appears to the reader sometime in the last third of the book.
Basically the story is about what would or might happen if we really made contact with an alien race. In this case the alien's aren't benevolent, they are much more advanced than we are and they are coming to take over the earth because their home is being destroyed. But the story is about how humans deal with knowing about these aliens.
I enjoyed the explanation of the proton unfolding and the creation of the tiny super-intelligence inside the protons. I have no idea about the science behind all this but it's well a well-thought out story.
The culture of the Trisolaris system is quite strange and actually rather disturbing with the dehydration and the continuous destruction of civilizations.
All in all, I found this book rather dark, with only a tiny sliver of hope in the end.
It does give interesting glimpses into China's past and presence however and when the story is finished somehow the parts make a more interesting whole than I expected.
Man, this was a conceptually thick book. I can't vouch for most of the science as presented, but I can say that the effort expended in incorporating that much science into a story of an impending apocalypse was impressive. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it.
For the majority of this book, I had three dominant thoughts:
1. "It's nice to see a science fiction writer who doesn't shy away from hard science."
2. "This book is how I imagine it'd be if someone took an anime and wrote it in book form."
3. "WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?"
I felt this way for 90% of the book (or so my Kindle revealed to me). Then, the last 10% happened and it all made sense. I finally understood, and it was amazing.
Enticing enough? Check it out for yourself; this is a treasure not to be missed.
Wonderful book on what scholarship is about. The book starts with a murder of a scientist by Red Guard students objecting to the hierarchy of knowledge. It continues with the scientist's daughter, a scientist as well, betraying the human civilization to an alien one, assuming that the humans' habitual abuse of each other and of knowledge means that a human civilization is not worth defending. The aliens attack scientists, especially physicists working on basic science, since these are the only ones capable of sufficiently increasing the Earth's knowledge and thus its ability to defend itself. The somewhat too optimistic author unites the planet's military establishment in defense of humanity. The aliens (instead of just waiting until the fundamental science will collapse due to the lack of funding, which would be my first choice) invest a lot of money into developing an intelligent entity which will make sure no experiments' results …
Wonderful book on what scholarship is about. The book starts with a murder of a scientist by Red Guard students objecting to the hierarchy of knowledge. It continues with the scientist's daughter, a scientist as well, betraying the human civilization to an alien one, assuming that the humans' habitual abuse of each other and of knowledge means that a human civilization is not worth defending. The aliens attack scientists, especially physicists working on basic science, since these are the only ones capable of sufficiently increasing the Earth's knowledge and thus its ability to defend itself. The somewhat too optimistic author unites the planet's military establishment in defense of humanity. The aliens (instead of just waiting until the fundamental science will collapse due to the lack of funding, which would be my first choice) invest a lot of money into developing an intelligent entity which will make sure no experiments' results will be reliable. The book is first in a series, so I am looking forward to reading the other two volumes.
