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If that is true, then why are people reading Chinese fiction? What do they do better than the western alternatives?
by erikb 10y ago
If that is true, then why are people reading Chinese fiction? What do they do better than the western alternatives?
- Barrin92 10y agoTalking about the Three Body Series specifically, the sheer scope and the lucidity of the writing was pretty breathtaking. Cixin Liu is like a Chinese Arthur C. Clarke, his novels are just overflowing with ideas. Haven't read anything like it since Clarke or Asimov in Western Science Fiction, with the exception of Ted Chiang.
- blacksmith_tb 10y agoHmm, comparing Liu to Clarke is fair, but I don't think it's so hard to find more recent western SF bristling with ideas, Iain Banks, for example. Liu does have a very different feel (the 'different perspective') other commenters have mentioned, which certainly makes it worth a read, in spite of the flatness of characters etc. Some of it may be down to the translator, I found Dark Forest to be much more fun, though some of that is developments in the plot, not just Ken Liu's translation, I'm sure.
- Barrin92 10y agoI haven't read Banks in a long time admittedly, but as you point out there's just something different about Liu's voice that I don't think I've read for a long time. Take for example things like this >"One thing in particular that struck him was the total absence of landscapes, the mark of a mature aesthetic sensibility: hanging landscape paintings in a house situated in the Garden of Eden would be as pointless as pouring a bucket of water into the ocean". There's some kind of "humanness" and scale to his writing that's really great. I think his characters are necessarily flat because his characters pretty much always are humanity looking outward, there's really no place for lots of individual development.