5 ms·

You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy[1]. Fantastic sci-fi. Utterly depressing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Eart

You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy[1]. Fantastic sci-fi. Utterly depressing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past

pavel_lishin 9y ago
I really enjoyed the first book, liked the second one, and wish I could unread the third one.
- radicaldreamer 9y ago
  The problem with the third book was that it rapidly expanded in scope and grandeur but was the same number of pages as the previous books, so concepts and scope and scale which had enough exposition in the previous books simply fell short in the third.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Kind of, but I think even so, it just wasn't consistent enough. It felt like his publisher demanded, "Ok, you owe us a third book. Let's go for Stephen Baxter's scale, with Greg Egan's mathematical prowess." That's not a reasonable goal to shoot for, unless you're Baxter or Egan.
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
I read The Three Body Problem by the same author. I wish I didn't. By the third volume I was reading more like the way you keep watching a slow catastrophe unfold. Not only does it paint an utterly depressing picture of the future and the Universe in general, but worse, the assumptions it makes about human nature basically imply this is a failed species.
- politician 9y ago
  Dune is often described as being about oil [1]. Similarly, TBP is mostly about Chinese nationalism and the politics involved with being economically intertwined with the United States while retaining an opportunistic military posture. The message of TBP is hopeful in that the US and China are ultimately locked together against a universe of unknowns. It totally goes off the deep end there at the end though, but this would be a hard book to write while living in China. The CPC wouldn't allow this kind of propaganda to be sold to the West if it didn't basically follow their party line. I mean, the author basically telegraphs this situation with the subplot about how the Terrans learn how FTL travel works. [1] https://futurism.media/dune-and-oil-the-real-world-influence-behind-frank-herbert-s-dune https://futurism.media/dune-and-oil-the-real-world-influence...
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    Ok, seen in that light it makes a bit more sense. The chapters where people are treated basically like grass, letting them dry out when conditions are unfavorable, and just hydrating them back to life when things get better - that's some seriously puke-inducing allegory. That's a world I would absolutely refuse to live in. Something is seriously wrong with a universe that produces that kind of outcome.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      The Trisolarian world was definitely shitty, and it's pretty improbable that life would manage to thrive there, but I thought it was still interesting. My problem with those novels shows up anywhere someone uses "pure logic" to solve some problem, but the logic is totally insane and nobody ever calls them on it. In fact the entire universe follows the same insane logic for some reason, and it dooms the whole place. It does get kind of funny near the end when the author decides that the big crunch is going to happen after all. But then all of the alien races have stolen too much of the mass of the universe to hide in their own little pocket universes so it won't happen. The protagonists at that point return their mass to the universe, but given the logic of the rest of the series there is no chance that the alien races will do that, the universe remains doomed.
    - 9y ago
- jandrese 9y ago
  The thing that kept bothering me about that novel is that it treated the entire human race as if they had the emotional maturity and stubbornness of a toddler. I was also a bit annoyed that the Trisolarians could mass produce these godlike sophons and never thought to use them to find non-inhabited solar systems to colonize. The third book did slightly explain this by having regions of space that broke their connection to home, but if you can produce thousands or millions of these things it doesn't matter so much if you lose some. The logic of "in order to prevent other species from using up the resources in our universe we have to destroy the universe" never really worked for me either. The third book had a low level flunkie in an alien race launch an attack that would doom the entire universe at the speed of light with only the approval of a low level middle-manager. I'd almost say it was a parody except that the books took themselves so seriously.
  - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
    My take on the "why are we behaving this way" was that, if you find intelligent life: a) Its probably either very far behind or very far ahead of you. b) Civilizations that are very far behind you can jump to being very far ahead of you "overnight" c) Civilizations that are very far ahead of you can launch a preemptive strike that is guaranteed to destroy you. d) Civilizations can modify local space to put themselves in a "stone-age" from which they cannot escape, thereby proving "we are not a threat". Rationally, the only thing to do is destroy any civ you can, or preemptively take yourself out of the game. An example of (c) was that Civilizations living in a n-dimensional universe could, if advanced enough, figure out how to modify themselves to live in an (n-1)-dimensional universe and then convert the n-d universe into an (n-1)-d universe that only they (and a few other clever civs) could survive in. Harsh. But rational.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Except of course you can escape from the Light Tombs using the pocket dimention door thing from the end of the book. That's another thing I found insane, in order to prove to the universe that you are not a threat you alter the speed of light in a solar system sized area in a way that the entire universe can easily see. If that isn't threatening I don't know what is. It doesn't even protect you from attacks! The logic that "if you see someone, you must kill them" is kind of like "the first country that develops nuclear weapons must immediately deploy them against every other country, even thought that dooms the world to a nuclear winter." It's super-villain logic that ignores all of the other potential solutions--like diplomac--and ignores the MAD component of being able to easily destroy solar systems. The entire reason given that alien species can't coexist is due to limited resources, but the Dark Forest mindset means they'll never be able to use those resources in the first place and at the end of the day they end up destroying all of them anyway. It's self defeating, and logically they should be able to figure that out. The book feels like it's written by some game theory nerd who can't look past the first order equations.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  Book one: lots and lots of scientists committing suicide out of despair that science is a lie (reader demographic will relate to this how?). End of book one: yay! Beginning of book two: oh we're totally fucked. End of book two: yay? Beginning of book three: yeah, we're totally fucked. End of book three: the universe and all possible future universes are totally fucked. It was epic. Highly recommended. So good to read sci-fi without a happy ending. Liked Horizon: Zero Dawn for same reason.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Science wasn't a lie, there was just an artificial cap on it, one that those scientists wouldn't even hit in their lifetime. And honestly, the cap seemed a bit contrived to me. I read it more that the Trisolarians headfaked all of humanity and three books later Humanity never realized it. There's more to science than smashing subatomic particles together. It would be quite the subversion of "Trisolarians suck at lying" meme that emerged later.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  >> You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy > I read The Three Body Problem by the same author. Information for future readers of this thread: those are the same books. (Also, 11/10 great sci-fi; highly recommended.)
knodi123 9y ago
Or on the fantasy front, Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. Everybody seems to love those books, and I can recognize their high quality - but they're so depressing. God, the ending just gutted me.
- kemayo 9y ago
  Yeah, I read through that trilogy, and the third book in particular really took it to a point of "flawed people fail to rise above their flaws; the future of the human race is wizards eating each other forever". Which, okay, is a valid story. Tragedy is a genre. It's just not really where I hoped the story was going.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

I really enjoyed the first book, liked the second one, and wish I could unread the third one.

radicaldreamer 9y ago
The problem with the third book was that it rapidly expanded in scope and grandeur but was the same number of pages as the previous books, so concepts and scope and scale which had enough exposition in the previous books simply fell short in the third.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Kind of, but I think even so, it just wasn't consistent enough. It felt like his publisher demanded, "Ok, you owe us a third book. Let's go for Stephen Baxter's scale, with Greg Egan's mathematical prowess." That's not a reasonable goal to shoot for, unless you're Baxter or Egan.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

I read The Three Body Problem by the same author. I wish I didn't. By the third volume I was reading more like the way you keep watching a slow catastrophe unfold. Not only does it paint an utterly depressing picture of the future and the Universe in general, but worse, the assumptions it makes about human nature basically imply this is a failed species.

politician 9y ago
Dune is often described as being about oil [1]. Similarly, TBP is mostly about Chinese nationalism and the politics involved with being economically intertwined with the United States while retaining an opportunistic military posture. The message of TBP is hopeful in that the US and China are ultimately locked together against a universe of unknowns. It totally goes off the deep end there at the end though, but this would be a hard book to write while living in China. The CPC wouldn't allow this kind of propaganda to be sold to the West if it didn't basically follow their party line. I mean, the author basically telegraphs this situation with the subplot about how the Terrans learn how FTL travel works. [1] https://futurism.media/dune-and-oil-the-real-world-influence-behind-frank-herbert-s-dune https://futurism.media/dune-and-oil-the-real-world-influence...
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  Ok, seen in that light it makes a bit more sense. The chapters where people are treated basically like grass, letting them dry out when conditions are unfavorable, and just hydrating them back to life when things get better - that's some seriously puke-inducing allegory. That's a world I would absolutely refuse to live in. Something is seriously wrong with a universe that produces that kind of outcome.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    The Trisolarian world was definitely shitty, and it's pretty improbable that life would manage to thrive there, but I thought it was still interesting. My problem with those novels shows up anywhere someone uses "pure logic" to solve some problem, but the logic is totally insane and nobody ever calls them on it. In fact the entire universe follows the same insane logic for some reason, and it dooms the whole place. It does get kind of funny near the end when the author decides that the big crunch is going to happen after all. But then all of the alien races have stolen too much of the mass of the universe to hide in their own little pocket universes so it won't happen. The protagonists at that point return their mass to the universe, but given the logic of the rest of the series there is no chance that the alien races will do that, the universe remains doomed.
  - 9y ago
jandrese 9y ago
The thing that kept bothering me about that novel is that it treated the entire human race as if they had the emotional maturity and stubbornness of a toddler. I was also a bit annoyed that the Trisolarians could mass produce these godlike sophons and never thought to use them to find non-inhabited solar systems to colonize. The third book did slightly explain this by having regions of space that broke their connection to home, but if you can produce thousands or millions of these things it doesn't matter so much if you lose some. The logic of "in order to prevent other species from using up the resources in our universe we have to destroy the universe" never really worked for me either. The third book had a low level flunkie in an alien race launch an attack that would doom the entire universe at the speed of light with only the approval of a low level middle-manager. I'd almost say it was a parody except that the books took themselves so seriously.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  My take on the "why are we behaving this way" was that, if you find intelligent life: a) Its probably either very far behind or very far ahead of you. b) Civilizations that are very far behind you can jump to being very far ahead of you "overnight" c) Civilizations that are very far ahead of you can launch a preemptive strike that is guaranteed to destroy you. d) Civilizations can modify local space to put themselves in a "stone-age" from which they cannot escape, thereby proving "we are not a threat". Rationally, the only thing to do is destroy any civ you can, or preemptively take yourself out of the game. An example of (c) was that Civilizations living in a n-dimensional universe could, if advanced enough, figure out how to modify themselves to live in an (n-1)-dimensional universe and then convert the n-d universe into an (n-1)-d universe that only they (and a few other clever civs) could survive in. Harsh. But rational.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Except of course you can escape from the Light Tombs using the pocket dimention door thing from the end of the book. That's another thing I found insane, in order to prove to the universe that you are not a threat you alter the speed of light in a solar system sized area in a way that the entire universe can easily see. If that isn't threatening I don't know what is. It doesn't even protect you from attacks! The logic that "if you see someone, you must kill them" is kind of like "the first country that develops nuclear weapons must immediately deploy them against every other country, even thought that dooms the world to a nuclear winter." It's super-villain logic that ignores all of the other potential solutions--like diplomac--and ignores the MAD component of being able to easily destroy solar systems. The entire reason given that alien species can't coexist is due to limited resources, but the Dark Forest mindset means they'll never be able to use those resources in the first place and at the end of the day they end up destroying all of them anyway. It's self defeating, and logically they should be able to figure that out. The book feels like it's written by some game theory nerd who can't look past the first order equations.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Book one: lots and lots of scientists committing suicide out of despair that science is a lie (reader demographic will relate to this how?). End of book one: yay! Beginning of book two: oh we're totally fucked. End of book two: yay? Beginning of book three: yeah, we're totally fucked. End of book three: the universe and all possible future universes are totally fucked. It was epic. Highly recommended. So good to read sci-fi without a happy ending. Liked Horizon: Zero Dawn for same reason.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Science wasn't a lie, there was just an artificial cap on it, one that those scientists wouldn't even hit in their lifetime. And honestly, the cap seemed a bit contrived to me. I read it more that the Trisolarians headfaked all of humanity and three books later Humanity never realized it. There's more to science than smashing subatomic particles together. It would be quite the subversion of "Trisolarians suck at lying" meme that emerged later.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
>> You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy > I read The Three Body Problem by the same author. Information for future readers of this thread: those are the same books. (Also, 11/10 great sci-fi; highly recommended.)

knodi123 9y ago

Or on the fantasy front, Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. Everybody seems to love those books, and I can recognize their high quality - but they're so depressing. God, the ending just gutted me.

kemayo 9y ago
Yeah, I read through that trilogy, and the third book in particular really took it to a point of "flawed people fail to rise above their flaws; the future of the human race is wizards eating each other forever". Which, okay, is a valid story. Tragedy is a genre. It's just not really where I hoped the story was going.