I hate that story so much. It’s practically the platonic ideal of engineer written fiction without the tiniest patina of knowledge of social science. A story ab

I hate that story so much. It’s practically the platonic ideal of engineer written fiction without the tiniest patina of knowledge of social science. A story about monstrous people and three worlds occupying one space over the course of a day in fantasy, good. As something vaguely purporting to be a plausible depiction of a possible reality it is absolute garbage. It makes no sense on a political, sociological or economic level. The machinery described is insanely complex and would be very, very expensive and all to get a tiny bit more use out of space when you could do as well by building skyscrapers, or going underground, or expanding the city. Beijing is big but there’s plenty of flat land to expand around it. If you can turn off all knowledge of how things work and just look at the human story of love, loss and sacrifice the translation and writing is excellent.