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Personally, I actually liked the ideas, but everything else was a complete disaster. The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic le

Personally, I actually liked the ideas, but everything else was a complete disaster. The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel. There's zero depth to any characters. By modern standards, it's all "tell", no "show". I've read several reviews that suggest this is actually how most modern Chinese novels are written. That doesn't make it more readable, unfortunately. The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal. My sense after reading was that I had just been reading Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" but without any of the humour. Many of Vonnegut's books are breezy, somewhat outrageous fables that don't go very deep into their characters, of course, but they work because they're funny, colourful, inventive, well written, and are full of great ideas. I think Lui Cixin's book would have worked much better as a Vonnegut-style satire. If you want a similarly dark look at the future of humanity's role in the universe, take a look at Peter Watts' Blindsight [1]. While it certainly won't win any prizes for literature, and it has some odd quirks, it's considerably better written, and might especially appeal to fans of Neal Stephenson's loose, ragged style of writing. Moreover, it's probably the creepiest sci-fi novel I've read. On the surface it's a somewhat straightforward story about a team of transhuman specialists who are dispatched to investigate an apparently alien artifact. But it goes deep into some fairly cynical ideaas about human consciousness that are somewhat existentially unnerving. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Firefall-Book-Peter-Watts-ebook/dp/B003K15EKM/ https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Firefall-Book-Peter-Watts-...

asark 8y ago
Second the recommendation for Blindsight. It's competently written (I don't mean that as faint praise) and has a darkness to it that's substantial enough to stick with you for a good long while. You're right that the prose is a little Stephenson-ish, but to avoid giving anyone the wrong impression I'd add that the pace, story, structure, and—how to put this?—evenness of quality aren't.
- atombender 8y ago
  Agreed, the pacing was great, and he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi. The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive.
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    > he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi The only persistent offender here I can think of is Stephenson. Who else are you thinking of? BTW, many years ago I used to hate Stephenson's dry style. But for some reason I kept reading his books because I like his ideas. Eventually I figured what he's really like - just a different attitude - and at that point I started to enjoy his writing quite a lot. Anathem is one of my favorite books in all literature, ever. > The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive. Yeah, that was boring.
    - atombender 8y ago
      Hm, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and Terry Pratchett come to mind. William Gibson, although I liked Neuromancer's ending, and every novel since that has followed the same template (mystery bigwig hires someone to find McGuffin, but is really manipulating/being manipulated about something else, the end). Maybe I was being harsh. I'll see if I can think of more examples. At the other end of the scale, Iain M. Banks never wrote a badly paced book that didn't have a perfect ending, as far as I'm concerned. The guy was a master.
      - ethbro 8y ago
        Gibson's books clicked for me where I read an interview in which he claimed Idoru was his favorite. (Though this was before his newer stuff) I finally realized his enjoyment is in Type B writing. It's the detail next to the main plot, rather than the motion itself. Which parallels what I like about film noir -- it's not about finding the murderer: it's about watching the characters find the murderer. Which is why I maintain the Lost ending was hilarious. JJ Abrams essentially said "Look, you didn't really care about the answers: you cared about watching these characters look for answers. And in the end, it's the characters who mattered." Which is probably not something you should ever point out to a TV geek if you want to keep your head intact. ;)
        8y ago
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  I guess I'm the only one who thought Blindsight's prose was delicious from front to back, then? I can see why people would think it's a little overdone, but I like that about it as well.
  - asark 8y ago
    Oh, no, the prose was fine. Did my post come off like I don't like the prose in Blindsight? I just didn't want anyone to think anything else about the book was similar to Stephenson's work at all—for one thing, Blindsight has an entire story that's fully plotted beginning to end, not just a bunch of amazing ideas and great first third that proceeds to go nowhere. [EDIT] the action writing in Blindsight is particularly good, in fact. Some of the best I've read.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel. > The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal. This might be an artifact of translation, combined with whatever cultural differences there are between Chinese literature and the "Western" literature (scare quotes because the category is loosely defined). The style actually seemed somewhat poetic to me. I'm just not knowledgeable enough in this neighborhood to pass judgment. But I agree that the style doesn't connect with the substance of the book, mostly because the substance is disjointed and so uneven. Blindsight is fairly bleak as well. At least Stephenson is unabashedly optimistic. Peter Watts is echoing there some very important debates in philosophy and neuroscience these days - Thomas Nagel's "what is it like to be something", David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, p-zombies, the skepticism of Dan Dennett, etc. The problem of consciousness in general. Blindsight is great as a sneaky introduction to these concepts, even though it's quite cynical, as you've said. I've never connected well with Vonnegut, actually. But then I didn't really connect either with hugely popular authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. Maybe there's a pattern there.
- atombender 8y ago
  Vonnegut is definitely in the same camp as Adams and Pratchett. I like to think that Adams was influenced by Vonnegut in his own writing, as Sirens could easily have passed for a Douglas Adams novel if it'd had more jokes and a bit more Britishness. One thing Adams and Vonnegut have in common is their almost nihilistic sense of cosmic absurdity and the futility of purpose. Without spoiling anything, the whole story in The Sirens of Titan turns out to be meaningless. A bit like how, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we eventually realize that Earth was originally created by little white, superintelligent mice to compute, over billions of years, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. (The answer isn't... terribly useful.) It's absurd, and funny, and sad at the same time. Vonnegut got more eccentric in his writing over time, but Sirens is actually very straightforward, and it's a masterpiece. Give it a shot. Cat's Cradle is also excellent. I never liked Slaughterhouse Five, which everyone recommends, as much.
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
knodi123 8y ago
wow, love that author biography on amazon! I like his chutzpah. > This is awkward and a little creepy. They tell me I have to do it for promotional purposes, but I've already got a blog. I've already got a website. Being told that setting up an author page on fcuking Amazon is essential to success? A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn't even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more? That just sucks the one-eyed purple trouser eel. > Still, here I am. But if you're really all that interested, go check out my actual blog/website. Google is not your friend (any more than Amazon is), but at least it'll point you in the right direction.
- klank 8y ago
  Peter Watts is great. I've very much enjoyed all of his books. I _love_ Blindsight.
Gatsky 8y ago
You actually hit on the point when you say it was 'unintentionally surreal' - you can probably lose the 'unintentionally'. It has a report-like 'stranger than fiction' quality that works very well for the novel I think, as if it is a declassified communist era file. It never lets up, never once winks at you. Contrast say "Use of Weapons" by Ian Banks - I just read this before "Death's End". This is a good book, lauded as one of the best Culture novels. Reading it you can sit back and think oh that's a nice metaphor, and I like how allegory is used here, and the pastiche of advanced technology and primitive human war is very interesting, and this unreliable double narrative structure running backwards and forwards in time is extremely clever. But when you read it you can sense it is being written for you, it lacks sufficient strangeness to induce a sense of wonder. I was no where near as riveted or interested in what was going on as I was with the 3 body books, I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen next. I certainly enjoy literary books, but I think describing the style and tone of Liu's books as simple and juvenile is missing the point a bit.
- atombender 8y ago
  No, I do think it's accidental. Or at least not intended the way I read it. It's surreal in the sense that the writer asks you accept certain developments at face value, just as it asks its characters to. If it had been a satire, then it would have perhaps been able to reach the heights of Vonnegut, Lem or Adams. But everything seems like it is meant sincerely, without irony. The wooden main characters run around like chess pieces with little or no inner life, just to fulfill the necessities of the next scene. The book lacks realism -- not in the sense of being realistic against our world, but in the sense that it's a fable, told like a children's story, yet seemingly marketed to adults. You kind of have to brace yourself a bit, as a reader, because it's told in the way an adult might speak to a slow child, which feels condescending. I don't want to be told how a character thinks or feels. There's nothing wrong with the story, per se (although I have issues with some things, like the nanotech at the end of the book, which comes as a huge deus ex machina -- it asks the reader to accept too much in terms of technological plausibility). The story is interesting. It's just told in a completely ridiculous way. Regarding Use of Weapons, I don't completely disagree. Unlike a lot of people, I don't think it's Banks' best work. I do think it's the superior book by far. I can forgive Banks for being playful about narrative forms even though it's a gimmick that doesn't elevate the story in any way (at least for me).

asark 8y ago

Second the recommendation for Blindsight. It's competently written (I don't mean that as faint praise) and has a darkness to it that's substantial enough to stick with you for a good long while. You're right that the prose is a little Stephenson-ish, but to avoid giving anyone the wrong impression I'd add that the pace, story, structure, and—how to put this?—evenness of quality aren't.

atombender 8y ago
Agreed, the pacing was great, and he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi. The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  > he really landed the ending, which is something of a rare feat in sci-fi The only persistent offender here I can think of is Stephenson. Who else are you thinking of? BTW, many years ago I used to hate Stephenson's dry style. But for some reason I kept reading his books because I like his ideas. Eventually I figured what he's really like - just a different attitude - and at that point I started to enjoy his writing quite a lot. Anathem is one of my favorite books in all literature, ever. > The only thing I didn't particularly enjoy was the flashbacks to the protagonist's past on Earth, which seemed a bit trite and repetitive. Yeah, that was boring.
  - atombender 8y ago
    Hm, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and Terry Pratchett come to mind. William Gibson, although I liked Neuromancer's ending, and every novel since that has followed the same template (mystery bigwig hires someone to find McGuffin, but is really manipulating/being manipulated about something else, the end). Maybe I was being harsh. I'll see if I can think of more examples. At the other end of the scale, Iain M. Banks never wrote a badly paced book that didn't have a perfect ending, as far as I'm concerned. The guy was a master.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      Gibson's books clicked for me where I read an interview in which he claimed Idoru was his favorite. (Though this was before his newer stuff) I finally realized his enjoyment is in Type B writing. It's the detail next to the main plot, rather than the motion itself. Which parallels what I like about film noir -- it's not about finding the murderer: it's about watching the characters find the murderer. Which is why I maintain the Lost ending was hilarious. JJ Abrams essentially said "Look, you didn't really care about the answers: you cared about watching these characters look for answers. And in the end, it's the characters who mattered." Which is probably not something you should ever point out to a TV geek if you want to keep your head intact. ;)
      - 8y ago
andrewflnr 8y ago
I guess I'm the only one who thought Blindsight's prose was delicious from front to back, then? I can see why people would think it's a little overdone, but I like that about it as well.
- asark 8y ago
  Oh, no, the prose was fine. Did my post come off like I don't like the prose in Blindsight? I just didn't want anyone to think anything else about the book was similar to Stephenson's work at all—for one thing, Blindsight has an entire story that's fully plotted beginning to end, not just a bunch of amazing ideas and great first third that proceeds to go nowhere. [EDIT] the action writing in Blindsight is particularly good, in fact. Some of the best I've read.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago

> The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel. > The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal. This might be an artifact of translation, combined with whatever cultural differences there are between Chinese literature and the "Western" literature (scare quotes because the category is loosely defined). The style actually seemed somewhat poetic to me. I'm just not knowledgeable enough in this neighborhood to pass judgment. But I agree that the style doesn't connect with the substance of the book, mostly because the substance is disjointed and so uneven. Blindsight is fairly bleak as well. At least Stephenson is unabashedly optimistic. Peter Watts is echoing there some very important debates in philosophy and neuroscience these days - Thomas Nagel's "what is it like to be something", David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, p-zombies, the skepticism of Dan Dennett, etc. The problem of consciousness in general. Blindsight is great as a sneaky introduction to these concepts, even though it's quite cynical, as you've said. I've never connected well with Vonnegut, actually. But then I didn't really connect either with hugely popular authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. Maybe there's a pattern there.

atombender 8y ago
Vonnegut is definitely in the same camp as Adams and Pratchett. I like to think that Adams was influenced by Vonnegut in his own writing, as Sirens could easily have passed for a Douglas Adams novel if it'd had more jokes and a bit more Britishness. One thing Adams and Vonnegut have in common is their almost nihilistic sense of cosmic absurdity and the futility of purpose. Without spoiling anything, the whole story in The Sirens of Titan turns out to be meaningless. A bit like how, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we eventually realize that Earth was originally created by little white, superintelligent mice to compute, over billions of years, the meaning of life, the universe and everything. (The answer isn't... terribly useful.) It's absurd, and funny, and sad at the same time. Vonnegut got more eccentric in his writing over time, but Sirens is actually very straightforward, and it's a masterpiece. Give it a shot. Cat's Cradle is also excellent. I never liked Slaughterhouse Five, which everyone recommends, as much.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago

knodi123 8y ago

wow, love that author biography on amazon! I like his chutzpah. > This is awkward and a little creepy. They tell me I have to do it for promotional purposes, but I've already got a blog. I've already got a website. Being told that setting up an author page on fcuking Amazon is essential to success? A company that treats us all like such goddamn children it doesn't even allow us to correctly spell an epithet with a venerable history going back 900 years or more? That just sucks the one-eyed purple trouser eel. > Still, here I am. But if you're really all that interested, go check out my actual blog/website. Google is not your friend (any more than Amazon is), but at least it'll point you in the right direction.

klank 8y ago
Peter Watts is great. I've very much enjoyed all of his books. I _love_ Blindsight.

Gatsky 8y ago

You actually hit on the point when you say it was 'unintentionally surreal' - you can probably lose the 'unintentionally'. It has a report-like 'stranger than fiction' quality that works very well for the novel I think, as if it is a declassified communist era file. It never lets up, never once winks at you. Contrast say "Use of Weapons" by Ian Banks - I just read this before "Death's End". This is a good book, lauded as one of the best Culture novels. Reading it you can sit back and think oh that's a nice metaphor, and I like how allegory is used here, and the pastiche of advanced technology and primitive human war is very interesting, and this unreliable double narrative structure running backwards and forwards in time is extremely clever. But when you read it you can sense it is being written for you, it lacks sufficient strangeness to induce a sense of wonder. I was no where near as riveted or interested in what was going on as I was with the 3 body books, I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen next. I certainly enjoy literary books, but I think describing the style and tone of Liu's books as simple and juvenile is missing the point a bit.

atombender 8y ago
No, I do think it's accidental. Or at least not intended the way I read it. It's surreal in the sense that the writer asks you accept certain developments at face value, just as it asks its characters to. If it had been a satire, then it would have perhaps been able to reach the heights of Vonnegut, Lem or Adams. But everything seems like it is meant sincerely, without irony. The wooden main characters run around like chess pieces with little or no inner life, just to fulfill the necessities of the next scene. The book lacks realism -- not in the sense of being realistic against our world, but in the sense that it's a fable, told like a children's story, yet seemingly marketed to adults. You kind of have to brace yourself a bit, as a reader, because it's told in the way an adult might speak to a slow child, which feels condescending. I don't want to be told how a character thinks or feels. There's nothing wrong with the story, per se (although I have issues with some things, like the nanotech at the end of the book, which comes as a huge deus ex machina -- it asks the reader to accept too much in terms of technological plausibility). The story is interesting. It's just told in a completely ridiculous way. Regarding Use of Weapons, I don't completely disagree. Unlike a lot of people, I don't think it's Banks' best work. I do think it's the superior book by far. I can forgive Banks for being playful about narrative forms even though it's a gimmick that doesn't elevate the story in any way (at least for me).