This is pretty much deliberate afaik. For a very prolific author Liu Cixin kind of hates characters and plot. There’s an essay of his where he talks about how his goal as a writer is to create fiction that moves according to geological time rather than the personal experiences of individual humans. It’s kind of an interesting idea but for some reason he still finds it necessary to do things like spend half of the second book talking about the protagonist creating his dream girl or whatever. Plenty of sf authors have done this type of zoomed out storytelling and it works well enough. He has lots of great ideas and I still think the first book is great, but I’m not sure how I feel about the others. I never got through the second one.
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I haven’t read the interviews, but from a death of the author perspective, I’d say he’s definitely interested in plot, and just bad at character? Like you say, these books could have been written from a real godseye perspective, but they aren’t. The way each of the meaty sf ideas is couched in a little plot twist cycle is what’s fun about the books.
The first is definitely best, because it balances the author’s natural inclination against something more emotionally interesting. As the books go on, he gets more comfortable just doing what he really wants and the end product is worse and more navelgazing. Very Dune.
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Yeah, I was surprised to read that essay, because at least in the first one there are some pretty interesting characters. It can sometimes be hard to judge the tone of these things and maybe it was intended to be more self deprecating than it came across, but he was basically saying “People are boring but physics and space are interesting.” I have a feeling some of his earlier short stories might pull this off more successfully. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the translator massaged a bit more depth out of the characters–Ken Liu basically takes the opposite approach in his own SF (it’s very character/story focused and a lot of the science is basically magical realism), so I feel like the two are a really good pair.
I could definitely see it working much better in a short story, which is a great place to sketch out a single good idea. Onedimensional placeholder characters can do their jobs before they wear out their welcome. It’s the length of the novel that demands depth of its characters - unless they keep changing; but Liu insists on keeping his small clutch of worldmovers around, going as far as to make up weird individual reasons they’d all hibernate so they can show up in all the important eras. Maybe he thinks people are so boring that he’s not even willing to make the effort to keep coming up with new shallow ones?
Also I didn’t realize Ken Liu had his own sf career; I should look into it!
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Yeah you gotta read The Paper Menagerie it’s genuinely touching.
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This is basically Death’s End. I felt like Liu really wanted to see this universe/situation he created through to the logically absurd ending so more than in the earlier two books there are several points where he basically tosses a life preserver to the necessary characters just to keep things moving.
Luo Ji and Ye Wenjie were the only good characters in that whole trilogy, I thought. I got sick of Cheng Xin after like 5 pages.
Edit: Da Shi was cool too.
I feel literally exactly the same.
With the caveat that the fantasy lady interlude with Luo Ji is interminable.
despite the plan to ration myself to one volume every six months, I read books three and four of karl ove knausgaard’s my struggle over the last two weeks. number five is already sat atop my book stack for when next I crumble
now pottering about rereading passages from my evergreen favourites fernando pessoa’s the book of disquiet and a biography of ludwig wittgenstein
started les miserables on saturday night, with the desire to really sink into a long narrative, but if I do that I will achieve nothing else for the next few weeks, which puts a dampener on my new year plans to be a big achiever
Somehow wound up listening to a Warhammer audiobook over the holiday that I can only describe as splattercamp
I honestly can’t fault it on that basis
Is it one of the ian watson ones
No it’s way more recent (from a quick wiki-ing), it’s called Fabius Bile
It’s about some sort of basically immortal mad chaste bioscientist and his friends seen through the eyes of a louche Renfield type guy and it’s like a really florid Troma movie in print
I kind of want to read more of these, feels like high trash
No. It’s over now and you should probably just stop reading because it only gets worse from here.
Suttree, maybe. Maybe.
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I don’t know about sheer number of good sentences, but I’ve never seen a sentence more… noteworthy than this one from the English tanslation of Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes:
“The morning, pressing its face, like the belly of a snail, against the windowpane, was laughing at him.”
A few more good ones:
“A shiver went through his whole body like a fluorescent light.”
“His fatigue spread out into a sluggish circle, like India ink dropped in water — it was a jellyfish, a scent bag, a diagram of an atomic nucleus.”
“He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.”
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I finally got around to A Voyage to Arcturus (a 1920 science fiction novel for those unfamiliar) and it’s excellent. I’m about halfway through (will probably finish it tonight or tomorrow).
Apparently this book was a major influence on C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, which for whatever reason didn’t really hold my interest past the first book as a kid and I never revisited it.
I can’t resist this type of idea-filled story about a journey through a strange and imaginative world.
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Cs lewis was influenced by loathing for the book actually, he thought it was evil
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The end of this book hit me like a ton of bricks. It summarized something I’d been grasping at re: life as a young shrug in just a few simple words. Way more impactful than I was prepared for a space fable filled with the silliest names ever printed to be!
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May be my favorite book. And it’s not just my weakness for allegory; surpassing strange, indulging in body transformation, a religious journey from a non-religious perspective. It’s all.
Tangenting…
David Kanaga (Proteus composer) turned me on to this book, and his work rhymes well with it. Proteus is a superb exercise in abstractions and Oikospiel is necessary.
And of course his plea for multi-sensory feedback:
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This book owns I read most of it sitting on a rock in the forest, very good summer that was
Also I have The Flight to Lucifer sitting on my shelf and have for years. I’m literally afraid to read it. It’s the only novel ever published by literary critic and probable creep Harold Bloom, and it was apparently directly inspired by A Voyage to Arcturus. It was panned on release and basically disowned by Bloom. It’s the “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” of gnostic fiction I guess.
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