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Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future

160 points by vincelt 4y ago

yboris 4y ago
I absolutely LOVED Liu Cixin's The Wandering Earth collection of short stories. One of my favorite Sci-Fi books. Surprised no one else mentioned it here yet.
once_inc 4y ago
While I highly enjoyed the trilogy (especially 'The Dark Forest'), the Science Fiction element of the story remains very soft. At no point does the author offer any meaningful explanation for any of the technologies used in the books. I really liked the story, and enjoyed the ride, but as a fan of 'hard SF' such as the Expanse or the Mars trilogy, this book left me somewhat dissatisfied.
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  Totally agreed. It's a strange vibe because it feels like it wants to be hard SF, but it's really not. Maybe it's something about the translation? It's very Asimov-like, in that the elements where the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions (or human/psychic, human/alien, human/robot, etc) handled in a very rationalist, almost mechanistic way. And also like Asimov, there's super-science stuff (e.g. warp drives in Foundation, time travel in The End of Eternity) that isn't "explained" in any way, it's just part of the setting.
  - ranger47 4y ago
    >the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions During my reading, I thought this was the point. I'm not sure the stories were trying to be in any specific genre, maybe genre-adjacent at best, but the author wanted to focus on what happens to the human and humanity with all this advanced, arguably fantastic tech.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      The story has some rather clear political biases that a lot of people don’t like, and I can’t help but think a lot of the criticism of the series comes from that. The most tyrannical human characters in the book impose their tyrannies for the sake of collectivism, and collectivist authoritarianism comes very close to dooming humanity more than once. I can imagine people who have collectivist political outlooks not liking it at all.
      - iainmerrick 4y ago
        I don’t see anybody criticising those aspects, though. When people criticise the science or the plot or the characterisation, why not take them at their word?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - elorant 4y ago
    Human interaction is terrible. All the characters are flat.
    - cooperadymas 4y ago
      I believe the OP means on a grander scale, not individuals. Individuals in the series largely act as if their personalities have been hit by the dual vector foil. But the series is rarely about the individuals. Instead its about exploring how humanity - and aliens - might react to the existence of one another. In this regard I feel Liu created in the reader a vertigo-inducing sensation of depth.
      - iainmerrick 4y ago
        I actually was thinking about the individuals, but you’re right, he talks about how societies behave too (and that’s more important for the overall themes of the novel). I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, although it’s not entirely my cup of tea; my comparison to Asimov is meant as a compliment.
    - perihelions 4y ago
      - "All the characters are flat." Too soon...
      - bananarchist 4y ago
        Too good
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  What is a "meaningful explanation" of technologies we have not yet created and science we have not yet discovered? In the limit, a work of "hard" "science" fiction ends up like a Star Trek episode scenario before the "tech" bits were filled-in - "Captain, the Tech is overteching. We must tech the tech" [1]. I've read the Expanse btw and it wasn't particularly more "hard" or any less made-up than anything else. I don't remember whether I've read the Mars trilogy. _____________ [1] http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-tech-is-overteching/ http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-te... In the interest of full disclosure I'm a total trekkie. I even like ST:E (a lot).
  - EdwardCoffin 4y ago
    Isn't this the opposite of hard science fiction? In my mind, hard science fiction is that where the science rules of the setting permeate and constrain the story, rather than being things to fill in. That said, I see more and more that people are accepting an alternative definition of hard science fiction, which is simply a way of distinguishing science fiction that does not involve outright magic from the fantasy/sf that does.
    - throwaway17_17 4y ago
      There is another view of the hard/soft sci-fi scale that has gained popularity among younger (i.e. under-30) commentators and reviewers where the scale is from: soft == any and all science things, discussions, or principles are merely set dressings to tell a story; hard == the science is the basis for the work and the consequences, interactions, etc of dealing with or addressing the ‘science things’ is the purpose of the work It’s kind of like saying the scale goes from just telling a story set on a space ship to writing a dissertation on long-haul space flight’s effects on human behaviors, which might have a narrative through line. I am not really sure I even like the premise of this usage of hard/soft sci-fi, I am much more prone to use the possible/impossible technology type of scale when discussing ‘hardness’ of sci-fi, but I don’t get to dictate the usage of language.
      - 4y ago
- wjnc 4y ago
  By no means disparaging and I'm addicted to the Expanse currently (book 5) - There is _no_ explanation of the technology (protomolecule, drive system, gates) in the books up until yet? Gravity and the Coriolis effect get mentioned a lot, the concept of a rail gun gets some explanation. I would classify Expanse as space opera. There's a lot more science, say, in Andy Weir. I think Andy would have a very hard time explaining the protomolecule.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Humans in the universe don't know how the protomolecule or the gates work though
    - wjnc 4y ago
      And we readers don't know how the Epstein drive works. Hence my conclusion: not hard scifi. The way the story is structured (each chapter a separate voice; most chapters a cliffhanger, like a tv series) and characters and crew are portrayed: space opera, with opera in the way of soap opera or telenovela (great word). I was thinking about why these books gripped me, while usually I get tired quickly of space opera. For me, it's in the quality of the execution. Each book and each chapter gives you direct action via a predictable sequence, while the characters get a little more round each iteration.
      - mavhc 4y ago
        It's a fusion drive
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  It's quite stellar that readers come away from some of these series with such different notions. Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one. Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars. I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology? On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.
  - ByThyGrace 4y ago
    "Hardness" in science fiction is scarcely an academical subject of literature. I personally like Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness [0] but not beyond a thought excercise. If you can, find me a published author stating "I wrote this story strictly in terms of a level 5 in the Mohs scale"; there will be none (unless they're targeting reddit as a reader base). [0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScal...
  - breuleux 4y ago
    TBP's sophon is one of the most blithely nonsensical sci-fi technologies I have ever read. I found it far, far more egregious than the Expanse's magical alien molecule, to the point it put me off reading other books in the trilogy. IMO it disqualifies TBP from the hard sci-fi category entirely, but I admit I might be a bit too worked up about it.
    - cooperadymas 4y ago
      Spoilers from the Expanse ahead... The protomolecule turned people into vomit zombies with a collective hive mind that could communicate instantaneously across the solar system and move an asteroid defying all laws of gravity, with the ultimate secret intent of building an interstellar wormhole. Again, in the series (at least early on) humans are quite limited by known constraints and it would easily be considered hard scifi in many regards. But its central conceit was no less blithely nonsensical than that of TBP's - I simply can't understand how someone could put one in the hard category but disqualify the other.
- shrx 4y ago
  Calling The Expanse "hard sci-fi", especially in comparison to the Three Body Problem, is quite rich.
  - mdorazio 4y ago
    I see this sentiment a lot and don't really understand it. Until the last few books there is a very clear distinction between the human tech (hard SF) and the alien tech (magic). The main story takes place very much within the limits of plausible physics (ships rely on reaction engines and takes weeks to traverse large distances, space combat and weapons are actually realistic, powered armor doesn't keep people safe from inertia, etc.), and then there are magical elements that the characters run up against. Contrast that with Three Body where the main plot driver revolves around FTL communication with indestructible intelligent nano-scale machines that can be anywhere any time, then gets progressively less realistic from there. I did enjoy the thread about the human ships going extra-solar, though, which was closer to Expanse in terms of Hard SF meeting a magical element (+dimensional travel).
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      Yes! What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it? I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
      - breuleux 4y ago
        TBP is also very cavalier about basic interactions with energy. To make a sophon, I kid you not, the aliens unfold a proton into a 2D sheet that they wrap around their entire planet. The unfolded proton has the same mass as the folded one (explicitly stated), but far from being invisible, it actually blocks all incoming light from their sun. That's orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to shatter protons in particle accelerators, smashing into the sophon for days on end, and it just... holds together? And then it gets to Earth and can apparently move and fold and unfold on its own and intercept all of our communications (which should also shatter it).
- uhtred 4y ago
  Interesting. I didn't like The Expanse at all- I thought it read like it had been written from the offset with the intention of it being a Netflix show. It lost me early on, when a character beat up a load of enemies with her jiu jitsu.
- tlb 4y ago
  Better to have no explanation than a bogus one, which is what it would have to be for things that haven't been invented yet. Sci-fi should focus on the social implications of hypothetical technologies.
omgmajk 4y ago
>It's now one my favorite sci-fi books. Same here, same here.
- emmelaich 4y ago
  I liked it but found it meandered into dead-ends a bit too much.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    The whole trilogy was a dead end. ;)
aortega 4y ago
This trilogy is the first one that I read that is on the same level, or even better, than Asimov's novels. Concepts and ideas here are much bigger, but there are so many cramped into every book that sometimes it feels like a Rick & Morty show. And I like that the point of technology is that no matter how advanced you are, there is always a bigger fish.
- chii 4y ago
  The only real "flaw" is that the dark forest theory hinges on the inability to communicate at superluminal speeds, and yet the novel has superluminal communication (siphons). But if you ignore all that, it is a brilliant piece of SF.
  - vincelt 4y ago
    How would the ability to communicate at superluminal speeds invalidate it? Isn't the civilization who can achieve that even more dangerous?
    - thehm 4y ago
      The Dark Forest problem posits that in the time required to send a message to a distant civilisation, the sender could just as easily send something that would destroy the distant civilisation. Further, that it is not possible to know without communication whether a distant civilisation would have peaceful or belligerant intent. Therefore, any civilisation that knows the existence of another should pre-emptively destroy the other rather than risk waiting to find out if it is peaceful If FTL communication is possible, it could be possible to establish the other civilisations intent before they could send anything destructive. As for the Sophon's it might be that they require a compatible recipient to work and so first require matter to be sent to the distant location. It's a long time since I read the Three Body books, but I seem to remember them being based on quantum-entangled particles, which would fit with this.
      - aortega 4y ago
iainmerrick 4y ago
Kind of cheap to quote from the first item in the article, but: While it could cost $10+ billion to build [...] scientists believe that carbon nanotube material could be the answer. Yeah, that's going to cost a lot more than $10 billion! There's plenty of fun tech and mega-structures in this book but I don't think it has anything interesting to say about the plausibility of any of it.
- k__ 4y ago
  Made me think of: "You're telling me Julius Caesar, who has been dead for well over 70 years, made this salad?"
hunglee2 4y ago
a brilliant series, scope is mind bogglingly vast. Liu Cixin is an engineer by trade as I understand, so the sci-fi is pretty 'hard', imo he was just trying to fit in a story to the end of the time in 3 volumes. Some adaptions coming up, hope they do it Game of Thrones level justice
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  Well the team leading the Netflix adaptation is led by the same two who led GoT, so that's likely the expectation from those funding the project.
ribit 4y ago
I’m currently reading the trilogy, and while it’s an entertaining enough read I don’t really understand the fascination with it. The overall plot is a bit simplistic, characters are wooden and storytelling awkward (but that might be an effect if Chinese literal tradition). Besides, the sci-fi elements are fairly weak and inconsistent. I mean, I can see that a reader who is used to the run of the mill contemporary sci-fi or fantasy would see this trilogy with its plot twists and big topics as some kind of masterpiece, but that’s a pretty low bar to beat. I can also see comparison with Asimov novels (it’s pretty clear that Liu tries to follow the narrative style of Foundation in his own way), but let’s be real here - Asimov wrote the core of his stuff hundred years ago and he pioneered the relevant plot devices. The main narrative innovation of Liu is the idea of total surveillance (no matter how hand-wavy it is introduced) and the rest is mostly poking around with a stick and awkwardly bringing plot points together.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  It gets points for audacity that has been largely lacking in domestic production. It is forgiven various flaws, for that. Tackling big themes is hard enough that we are obliged to forgive much to get it. So we do.
- nus07 4y ago
  The Dark Forest is a great book and the first one is alright. The fascination mainly stems from having a non-western sci-fi point of view since most other sci-fi books always were written from a Western protagonist standpoint. Also the backdrop is the cultural revolution which riles up a lot of people.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  I liked it a lot more than Asimov's, for what it's worth. It's one of my favorite stories so, yes, I would say it's a masterpiece. The plot is not simplistic and the characters do not appear wooden to me. The Expanse I liked even better (at least until the last book or two), though it probably helped that I didn't have trouble remembering the names. My western bias shows in that I had a lot of trouble telling apart the chinese names even on the second "read" (audio book) of the 3BP trilogy, especially when they then add nicknames into the mix. Da Chu and Chu Cheng are the same person¹, but besides him and a few other main characters, I had to get who's who from context. (And, pardon, but calling people Ding, Dong, and Meow takes me out of the story the first few mentions.) Whether I'd still like The Expanse more if I didn't have this problem in 3BP... hmm, probably yes because there's this 'political correctness' stuff that isn't really my thing, but it would certainly be a close call. ¹ Now that I look it up on Wikipedia, it's apparently spelled Shi Qiang and Da Shi. (Original spelling is from memory, last time I listened to the books was about a year ago)
Lewton 4y ago
My “favorite” part of the trilogy, is when a character in the book praises the writing and quality of a couple of fairytales that are part of the plot and written in the book As in.. Cixin literally calling his own writing great and patting himself on the back
- lucb1e 4y ago
  It's a plot point that these stories are well-liked. The stories themselves are objectively simplistic, but in the minds of the party to whom they are supposed to be good (trying to avoid spoilers here), it can make sense that they would like them. I didn't cynically read it as the author saying their own stories are so amazing. I do think the embedded extra meanings are well-made. Whether it would actually work and remain undiscovered by the aforementioned party is a bit besides the point for me: the fact that the author made it work at all is nicely done. A lot of 'bad' writers show only reactions and never more than shards of the actual text to avoid having to make something that lives up to the claims.
  - Lewton 4y ago
    You gotta admit, it's pretty funny though And to your edit, I agree, the fairytales were a highlight of the book
- andrewf 4y ago
  The characters in Tolkien's books really liked singing Tolkien's songs.
- WiSaGaN 4y ago
  In fact, Liu was found praising his own books in a forum using burner accounts after the publication, and also reminding people that the Hugo award the novel received was "huge in the Western sci-fi world". He was probably truly happy when Obama said he was a fan.
ss108 4y ago
I was going to read his books, but then discovered he parrots Chinese government propaganda about the Uighur genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin#Political_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin#Political_views
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books. He has hypothetical future governments doing things arguably worse. Fiction is largely about fictional people doing bad things, or being forestalled trying them.
  - ss108 4y ago
    > He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books. So? lol "It's ok if he believes putting certain people in concentration camps is good so long as he doesn't mention that in his books"
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      We don't know what he believes. We only know he is obliged to say what keeps him out of a re-education camp. What would you be saying, in his position? Be honest.
      - ivanstojic 4y ago
        This is true, but only by omission: we don't know everything he believes. We do know he publicly supports the genocide in order to protect himself. MLK day is around the corner. It's worth considering what it cost some people to do the right thing, vs what some people got paid to support the wrong thing.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Let us consider what it cost MLK, and whether we demand that of everybody. I favor applauding people for speaking out in risky circumstances. Condemning them for failing to risk what we need not is questionable.
p-e-w 4y ago
Ironically, buried in a footnote at the end of the article is a reference to the only technology that will actually matter in the future: "All images generated with Midjourney."
alex_suzuki 4y ago
I extremely enjoyed the trilogy, was hesitant at first because I‘ve never read Chinese sci-fi. One thing I enjoyed reading about was the whole concept of the „Dark Forest“: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
Semaphor 4y ago
Sidebar: For anyone who liked it, and wants a related, a bit more "out there" story: The Redemption of Time is fan fiction, but the novel has been officially blessed by the author and published by the original publisher, and later by Tor in English. It’s not quite on the level, writing wise, but quite close. This sequel takes place so many years in the future, that it’s buttery-soft sci-fi, though. I still enjoyed it.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  Redemption of Time really disappointed me tbh. I'd much rather than the original author wrote more than rubber stamping this fan fic.
  - sylens 4y ago
    I think there are some good ideas in Redemption of Time (like what was the real cause of the Trisolaran cultural reflection) but the last third of it just goes off the rails
thehm 4y ago
Nice graphics, but the article misses what was the most interesting new (to me) idea in the books: the Droplets, which are made of "strong interaction" material so dense that miniscule amounts can destroy planets. I'd love to read more about this idea.
- vincelt 4y ago
  True! I missed this one. Will read a bit on it and add an edit.
- aortega 4y ago
  There are much more ideas, I.E. (Spoilers!) dimensional attacks, slow light-speed areas and their effects, math attacks, destruction of the fabric of spacetime, nano-scale multi-dimensional computers, whole universes trapped inside elemental particles, etc. There are so many interesting plots that each one could be an entire book on his own.
jefc1111 4y ago
I read the trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. But yes, not exactly hard sci-fi through and through. My favourite idea wasn't even really a sci-fi thing. I really liked the idea of the Wallfacers. Really clever bit of storytelling, I thought. https://three-body-problem.fandom.com/wiki/Wallfacer https://three-body-problem.fandom.com/wiki/Wallfacer (spoilers, I guess)
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  The Wallfacers were amazing. I also liked how "no good deed goes unpunished" applies to everyone who saves humanity from extinction. I suspect this is the part that actually rubs most people the wrong way.
moloch-hai 4y ago
SpaceX's Starship+Superheavy ("can+kicker", informally) promises $100/kg to orbit. (Musk is on record lying that it might be $20/kg.) So, the space elevator would need to do much better than $50/kg. Anyway there are better alternatives than the space elevator that have the advantage of being, y'know, possible. The orbiting, rotating "skyhook" concept, that dips down to snatch a payload from the upper atmosphere and fling it to space, is one. A ring-shaped version, rolling, might be more structurally practical. None of the ideas cited in the article originate from Liu. He riffs on them. What would make them more interesting would be knowing how to achieve them. But we don't. People are working on some of them. Some are just bad ideas, the Neptune one spectacularly so.
- vincelt 4y ago
  Thanks! Will add an edit mentioning your points on the elevator. As for the Neptune idea, assuming 200+ years of technological progress in chemistry and physics, isn't there something that could be remotely viable about the idea? (Not fixating on Neptune in particular, but as in using materials from other planets.)
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    An advantage of alternatives to rockets would be that they do not contribute to destroying the ozone layer. Restoring the ozone layer by dispersing ozone could be a useful idea, but all it requires of material is oxygen, which we have plenty of right here. Neptune has nothing extra we need. The sun turns oxygen into ozone by the gigaton, today. To really address the problem, you would need to remove the fluorine compounds that consume the ozone. Nobody seems to have a better idea than not to vent more. The space elevator notion relies on discovering a material strong enough to build it of. Other schemes seem possible with existing materials. Neptune has helium-3 that might someday be useful as fuel for aneutronic fusion, if we can get that to work. Hardly anybody is trying. Getting to Neptune and collecting it seems even harder than getting aneutronic fusion working.
    - dmix 4y ago
      It sounds like Skyhooks still need lots of rockets to reach the hook, just much less fuel needed to burn per trip. > A skyhook differs from a geostationary orbit space elevator in that a skyhook would be much shorter and would not come in contact with the surface of the Earth. A skyhook would require a suborbital launch vehicle to reach its lower end, while a space elevator would not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)?oldformat=...
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
Really loved this trilogy, sure there might be some inconsistencies here and there, but it's still pretty much hard sci-fi or borderline so and more importantly I don't know any other sci-fi books which are so intense like this one. Relentless twists, there is really little time to be bored.
pharmakom 4y ago
The AI generated images were excellent. I love that the cost of such concept images has come way, way down.
- vincelt 4y ago
  Thank you! I did spent a substantial amount of time playing with prompts, variations and upscales to try and get decent results. The space elevator one for example, way harder than I thought. Still not fully satisfied but good enough.
- detritus 4y ago
  Myeh, they're clearly AI-generated but that's not my complaint here - the absolute inconsistency in style and ultimate lack of 'overall style' or visual grammar's what bugs here. It may as well be a poorly-considered selection of clip art, from multiple disparate sources as used to be a problem back in the 90s. It'll take a while for people to get used to considering graphic generation as more than mere visual placeholders, I suppose. Early days.
  - vincelt 4y ago
    Yes, I struggled to get a semblant of similar styles between the pictures, despite the same suffixes or playing with 'remixes'. Sometimes, adding one extra word to the prompt (even though it doesn't describe the style) will change the whole visual style or change the thing you're trying to highlight. It was my first time with Midjourney, I'm sure there are tricks to improve on that. Might revisit the images, I do agree that the styling inconsistencies don't look too good.
    - detritus 4y ago
      As a 'sometime designer' who has dabbled in MJ quite a lot, I'd suggest taking the outputs and then running them through something like Photoshop and tweaking them in there to get them to somehow match a bit more - eg. you could add a texture, or halftone them, or alter the hue and saturation to standardise them a bit. Whilst MJ can texturise things, it does tend to fall over a bit when doing so. Good luck!
ur-whale 4y ago
Worth noting, the sentence at the end of the article: > All images generated with Midjourney. Amazing.
sixstringtheory 4y ago
I loved the trilogy even though I agree with various criticisms discussed here. But I think those can be easily forgiven if you’re trying to see the forest (heh) instead of the trees. Yes the mechanics of reading are kind of a slog due to the translation, and constant repetition of full character names. You just have to figure out how to efficiently read it. And there are plenty of scientific and technological incongruities, of the form “if they had the tech to do X, why do they still do Y?” Sometimes there was a narrative reason for such, and the rest I just left to entertainment value while consuming a social commentary. It was the first time I think encountering some narrative devices which I enjoyed. I liked seeing the dialogue with Trisolarans that appear in a sans-serif font. I liked the excerpts from A Past Outside of Time in Death’s End, although sometimes they wind up sort of repeating what had just happened in the previous chapter. Also the fairy tales in Death’s End I thought were some of the best writing and devices in the whole series.
tlb 4y ago
I'm disappointed by the slow progress in cryo-suspension. It seems like it should be possible, and would be very useful on earth too. You could just hop however many years into the future. It'd have fascinating social implications if people could do that. The main problem is apparently that ice crystals grow and damage cell membranes. Surprising that that should be so unsolvable.
- tgv 4y ago
  Why should it be possible? We weren't built for that. The stories about the bodies that have actually been frozen are horrifying. And I don't see the use, apart from personal curiosity. But imagine yourself waking up, 200 years in the future (if anyone would be willing to thaw you): you're an old, penniless, and clueless body without papers, adding extra weight to a world that has its own problems. People will still be people, so you're not going to like it.
  - tlb 4y ago
    "We weren't built for it" isn't really an argument. There are so many counterexamples of things we weren't built for but are popular. It lets you make a bet on the future being better. Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago be mightily impressed by today's level of technology and prosperity? The bet can go badly, of course. The world might get worse. But it's a reasonable bet to make if you believe in continued progress.
    - tgv 4y ago
      > Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago That would have been 1823. No electricity, no cars, no running water, let alone computers and digital payment, and probably a pretty different dialect. He would be homeless. Imagine being someone like Rockefeller ending up between homeless immigrants and gangs. No matter how much progress society has made, that person wouldn't enjoy it.
bookofjoe 4y ago
Coming this year: https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-three-body-problem-netflix-season-1-everything-we-know-so-far-10-2022/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-three-body-problem...
asgerhb 4y ago
The space elevator. Ah yes, famously introduced in Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest.
sylens 4y ago
I am a huge fan of the trilogy but it's because I accept it for what it is. Most of the characters are not that well written and do not have satisfying arcs; instead, they are merely there to push the plot in a certain direction at the required moment. I also didn't think that the technologies got too fantastical until Death's End, where everybody inside the solar system as well as outside of it are experiencing new things every 25 pages or so. I still think back to the trilogy as different events over the last few years. Looking back at the actions and habits some people started during the early weeks of the pandemic (washing groceries) feels a lot like humans at the end of the Dark Forest looked back at the early years of the Crisis Era - a lot of grasping at straws and trying to give the appearance of doing something. And it's very easy to see how people would turn against Escapism in the end.
molly0 4y ago
Liu Cixin manages to write a great sci-fi trilogy with an interesting global plot without pissing of the chines communist party - that's what I find really impressive.
izzydata 4y ago
I'm pretty confident that it is intentionally not about the characters. People are so used to stories where specific characters are individual saviors of everyone else, but I don't think that is the purpose of the characters in this story. There just needs to be characters to help guide the story and have a lens to view the world through, but who they are and what they want is not the purpose of the book. It's more about the collective response of humanity to situations and any individuals perspective is not that important. This was one of the things that I actually really enjoyed about this series. I really don't think a book that is as grandiose as this where the entire world, solar system and universe are at stake can have an individual savior like a super man.
evrydayhustling 4y ago
I liked the illustrations on this post. Where are they from?
avmich 4y ago
The space elevator has an unsolved problem of colliding with satellites in space, so even if we find a good material to build it, it won't work.
wwarner 4y ago
I thought this trilogy was full of fresh takes. For one thing, it’s written from a Chinese pov, so things like the cultural revolution and appeal of authoritarianism are big themes. Second, it’s full of dry humor. It’s hysterical when aliens’ super weapon doesn’t work, over and over again. Third, it toys with issues in the philosophy of science, like how how our view of reality can change because of long periods of comfort or difficulty, or just boredom too, even though reality hasn’t changed at all. I would read more of these if he wrote them.
bwanab 4y ago
The space elevator was proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in Fountains of Paradise in 1979. That said, I do love Cixin Liu's work even if I don't love his prose.
Mikho 4y ago
For those who enjoyed the trilogy, there is a fourth book "The Redemption of Time: A Three-Body Problem Novel" written by Baoshu [1]. Originally one of the first fanfics by the Chinese sci fi author. Later approved by Liu Cixin himself for publishing and translated into English by the same sci fi author Ken Liu who also translated the original trilogy. The book envisions the aftermath of the conflict between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans. 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42646354-the-redemption-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42646354-the-redemption-...

160 points by vincelt 4y ago

I absolutely LOVED Liu Cixin's The Wandering Earth collection of short stories. One of my favorite Sci-Fi books. Surprised no one else mentioned it here yet.

once_inc 4y ago

While I highly enjoyed the trilogy (especially 'The Dark Forest'), the Science Fiction element of the story remains very soft. At no point does the author offer any meaningful explanation for any of the technologies used in the books. I really liked the story, and enjoyed the ride, but as a fan of 'hard SF' such as the Expanse or the Mars trilogy, this book left me somewhat dissatisfied.

iainmerrick 4y ago
Totally agreed. It's a strange vibe because it feels like it wants to be hard SF, but it's really not. Maybe it's something about the translation? It's very Asimov-like, in that the elements where the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions (or human/psychic, human/alien, human/robot, etc) handled in a very rationalist, almost mechanistic way. And also like Asimov, there's super-science stuff (e.g. warp drives in Foundation, time travel in The End of Eternity) that isn't "explained" in any way, it's just part of the setting.
- ranger47 4y ago
  >the author puts in the most thought and energy are about human interactions During my reading, I thought this was the point. I'm not sure the stories were trying to be in any specific genre, maybe genre-adjacent at best, but the author wanted to focus on what happens to the human and humanity with all this advanced, arguably fantastic tech.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    The story has some rather clear political biases that a lot of people don’t like, and I can’t help but think a lot of the criticism of the series comes from that. The most tyrannical human characters in the book impose their tyrannies for the sake of collectivism, and collectivist authoritarianism comes very close to dooming humanity more than once. I can imagine people who have collectivist political outlooks not liking it at all.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      I don’t see anybody criticising those aspects, though. When people criticise the science or the plot or the characterisation, why not take them at their word?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- elorant 4y ago
  Human interaction is terrible. All the characters are flat.
  - cooperadymas 4y ago
    I believe the OP means on a grander scale, not individuals. Individuals in the series largely act as if their personalities have been hit by the dual vector foil. But the series is rarely about the individuals. Instead its about exploring how humanity - and aliens - might react to the existence of one another. In this regard I feel Liu created in the reader a vertigo-inducing sensation of depth.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      I actually was thinking about the individuals, but you’re right, he talks about how societies behave too (and that’s more important for the overall themes of the novel). I wasn’t trying to be dismissive, although it’s not entirely my cup of tea; my comparison to Asimov is meant as a compliment.
  - perihelions 4y ago
    - "All the characters are flat." Too soon...
    - bananarchist 4y ago
      Too good
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
What is a "meaningful explanation" of technologies we have not yet created and science we have not yet discovered? In the limit, a work of "hard" "science" fiction ends up like a Star Trek episode scenario before the "tech" bits were filled-in - "Captain, the Tech is overteching. We must tech the tech" [1]. I've read the Expanse btw and it wasn't particularly more "hard" or any less made-up than anything else. I don't remember whether I've read the Mars trilogy. _____________ [1] http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-tech-is-overteching/ http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-te... In the interest of full disclosure I'm a total trekkie. I even like ST:E (a lot).
- EdwardCoffin 4y ago
  Isn't this the opposite of hard science fiction? In my mind, hard science fiction is that where the science rules of the setting permeate and constrain the story, rather than being things to fill in. That said, I see more and more that people are accepting an alternative definition of hard science fiction, which is simply a way of distinguishing science fiction that does not involve outright magic from the fantasy/sf that does.
  - throwaway17_17 4y ago
    There is another view of the hard/soft sci-fi scale that has gained popularity among younger (i.e. under-30) commentators and reviewers where the scale is from: soft == any and all science things, discussions, or principles are merely set dressings to tell a story; hard == the science is the basis for the work and the consequences, interactions, etc of dealing with or addressing the ‘science things’ is the purpose of the work It’s kind of like saying the scale goes from just telling a story set on a space ship to writing a dissertation on long-haul space flight’s effects on human behaviors, which might have a narrative through line. I am not really sure I even like the premise of this usage of hard/soft sci-fi, I am much more prone to use the possible/impossible technology type of scale when discussing ‘hardness’ of sci-fi, but I don’t get to dictate the usage of language.
    - 4y ago
wjnc 4y ago
By no means disparaging and I'm addicted to the Expanse currently (book 5) - There is _no_ explanation of the technology (protomolecule, drive system, gates) in the books up until yet? Gravity and the Coriolis effect get mentioned a lot, the concept of a rail gun gets some explanation. I would classify Expanse as space opera. There's a lot more science, say, in Andy Weir. I think Andy would have a very hard time explaining the protomolecule.
- mavhc 4y ago
  Humans in the universe don't know how the protomolecule or the gates work though
  - wjnc 4y ago
    And we readers don't know how the Epstein drive works. Hence my conclusion: not hard scifi. The way the story is structured (each chapter a separate voice; most chapters a cliffhanger, like a tv series) and characters and crew are portrayed: space opera, with opera in the way of soap opera or telenovela (great word). I was thinking about why these books gripped me, while usually I get tired quickly of space opera. For me, it's in the quality of the execution. Each book and each chapter gives you direct action via a predictable sequence, while the characters get a little more round each iteration.
    - mavhc 4y ago
      It's a fusion drive
cooperadymas 4y ago
It's quite stellar that readers come away from some of these series with such different notions. Look up lists of the best hard scifi and you'll find the Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy, or at least the Three Body Problem, on almost every one. Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars. I'll give you that the further the trilogy goes the looser the explanations get, but that's by design. We jump far, far to the end of the universe. How does anyone give a reasonable explanation for billion year advanced technology? On the flipside, in the Expanse, humans are limited by physics and largely modern limitations, sure, but the crux of the story is built around a magical alien molecule for which we are never given an explanation. It's hard scifi to a degree, but no less soft than say, the sophon in ROEP.
- ByThyGrace 4y ago
  "Hardness" in science fiction is scarcely an academical subject of literature. I personally like Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness [0] but not beyond a thought excercise. If you can, find me a published author stating "I wrote this story strictly in terms of a level 5 in the Mohs scale"; there will be none (unless they're targeting reddit as a reader base). [0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScal...
- breuleux 4y ago
  TBP's sophon is one of the most blithely nonsensical sci-fi technologies I have ever read. I found it far, far more egregious than the Expanse's magical alien molecule, to the point it put me off reading other books in the trilogy. IMO it disqualifies TBP from the hard sci-fi category entirely, but I admit I might be a bit too worked up about it.
  - cooperadymas 4y ago
    Spoilers from the Expanse ahead... The protomolecule turned people into vomit zombies with a collective hive mind that could communicate instantaneously across the solar system and move an asteroid defying all laws of gravity, with the ultimate secret intent of building an interstellar wormhole. Again, in the series (at least early on) humans are quite limited by known constraints and it would easily be considered hard scifi in many regards. But its central conceit was no less blithely nonsensical than that of TBP's - I simply can't understand how someone could put one in the hard category but disqualify the other.
shrx 4y ago
Calling The Expanse "hard sci-fi", especially in comparison to the Three Body Problem, is quite rich.
- mdorazio 4y ago
  I see this sentiment a lot and don't really understand it. Until the last few books there is a very clear distinction between the human tech (hard SF) and the alien tech (magic). The main story takes place very much within the limits of plausible physics (ships rely on reaction engines and takes weeks to traverse large distances, space combat and weapons are actually realistic, powered armor doesn't keep people safe from inertia, etc.), and then there are magical elements that the characters run up against. Contrast that with Three Body where the main plot driver revolves around FTL communication with indestructible intelligent nano-scale machines that can be anywhere any time, then gets progressively less realistic from there. I did enjoy the thread about the human ships going extra-solar, though, which was closer to Expanse in terms of Hard SF meeting a magical element (+dimensional travel).
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    Yes! What really irked me about The Three Body Problem was the way it blithely introduced faster-than-light communication as a plot point -- a key plot point! -- without any hint of a nod to the fact that this is impossible as far as we currently know. In fact, quite the opposite, the speed of light is taken to be a hard limit elsewhere in the story and that plays a key role too. So which is it? I think it can be okay to invent magical tech in hard SF, if and only if you clearly distinguish the magical bits and work through all the ramifications logically. A great example is the “bobbles” in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
    - breuleux 4y ago
      TBP is also very cavalier about basic interactions with energy. To make a sophon, I kid you not, the aliens unfold a proton into a 2D sheet that they wrap around their entire planet. The unfolded proton has the same mass as the folded one (explicitly stated), but far from being invisible, it actually blocks all incoming light from their sun. That's orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to shatter protons in particle accelerators, smashing into the sophon for days on end, and it just... holds together? And then it gets to Earth and can apparently move and fold and unfold on its own and intercept all of our communications (which should also shatter it).
uhtred 4y ago
Interesting. I didn't like The Expanse at all- I thought it read like it had been written from the offset with the intention of it being a Netflix show. It lost me early on, when a character beat up a load of enemies with her jiu jitsu.
tlb 4y ago
Better to have no explanation than a bogus one, which is what it would have to be for things that haven't been invented yet. Sci-fi should focus on the social implications of hypothetical technologies.

omgmajk 4y ago

>It's now one my favorite sci-fi books. Same here, same here.

emmelaich 4y ago
I liked it but found it meandered into dead-ends a bit too much.
- izzydata 4y ago
  The whole trilogy was a dead end. ;)

aortega 4y ago

This trilogy is the first one that I read that is on the same level, or even better, than Asimov's novels. Concepts and ideas here are much bigger, but there are so many cramped into every book that sometimes it feels like a Rick & Morty show. And I like that the point of technology is that no matter how advanced you are, there is always a bigger fish.

chii 4y ago
The only real "flaw" is that the dark forest theory hinges on the inability to communicate at superluminal speeds, and yet the novel has superluminal communication (siphons). But if you ignore all that, it is a brilliant piece of SF.
- vincelt 4y ago
  How would the ability to communicate at superluminal speeds invalidate it? Isn't the civilization who can achieve that even more dangerous?
  - thehm 4y ago
    The Dark Forest problem posits that in the time required to send a message to a distant civilisation, the sender could just as easily send something that would destroy the distant civilisation. Further, that it is not possible to know without communication whether a distant civilisation would have peaceful or belligerant intent. Therefore, any civilisation that knows the existence of another should pre-emptively destroy the other rather than risk waiting to find out if it is peaceful If FTL communication is possible, it could be possible to establish the other civilisations intent before they could send anything destructive. As for the Sophon's it might be that they require a compatible recipient to work and so first require matter to be sent to the distant location. It's a long time since I read the Three Body books, but I seem to remember them being based on quantum-entangled particles, which would fit with this.
    - aortega 4y ago

iainmerrick 4y ago

Kind of cheap to quote from the first item in the article, but: While it could cost $10+ billion to build [...] scientists believe that carbon nanotube material could be the answer. Yeah, that's going to cost a lot more than $10 billion! There's plenty of fun tech and mega-structures in this book but I don't think it has anything interesting to say about the plausibility of any of it.

k__ 4y ago
Made me think of: "You're telling me Julius Caesar, who has been dead for well over 70 years, made this salad?"

hunglee2 4y ago

a brilliant series, scope is mind bogglingly vast. Liu Cixin is an engineer by trade as I understand, so the sci-fi is pretty 'hard', imo he was just trying to fit in a story to the end of the time in 3 volumes. Some adaptions coming up, hope they do it Game of Thrones level justice

neodymiumphish 4y ago
Well the team leading the Netflix adaptation is led by the same two who led GoT, so that's likely the expectation from those funding the project.

ribit 4y ago

I’m currently reading the trilogy, and while it’s an entertaining enough read I don’t really understand the fascination with it. The overall plot is a bit simplistic, characters are wooden and storytelling awkward (but that might be an effect if Chinese literal tradition). Besides, the sci-fi elements are fairly weak and inconsistent. I mean, I can see that a reader who is used to the run of the mill contemporary sci-fi or fantasy would see this trilogy with its plot twists and big topics as some kind of masterpiece, but that’s a pretty low bar to beat. I can also see comparison with Asimov novels (it’s pretty clear that Liu tries to follow the narrative style of Foundation in his own way), but let’s be real here - Asimov wrote the core of his stuff hundred years ago and he pioneered the relevant plot devices. The main narrative innovation of Liu is the idea of total surveillance (no matter how hand-wavy it is introduced) and the rest is mostly poking around with a stick and awkwardly bringing plot points together.

moloch-hai 4y ago
It gets points for audacity that has been largely lacking in domestic production. It is forgiven various flaws, for that. Tackling big themes is hard enough that we are obliged to forgive much to get it. So we do.
nus07 4y ago
The Dark Forest is a great book and the first one is alright. The fascination mainly stems from having a non-western sci-fi point of view since most other sci-fi books always were written from a Western protagonist standpoint. Also the backdrop is the cultural revolution which riles up a lot of people.
lucb1e 4y ago
I liked it a lot more than Asimov's, for what it's worth. It's one of my favorite stories so, yes, I would say it's a masterpiece. The plot is not simplistic and the characters do not appear wooden to me. The Expanse I liked even better (at least until the last book or two), though it probably helped that I didn't have trouble remembering the names. My western bias shows in that I had a lot of trouble telling apart the chinese names even on the second "read" (audio book) of the 3BP trilogy, especially when they then add nicknames into the mix. Da Chu and Chu Cheng are the same person¹, but besides him and a few other main characters, I had to get who's who from context. (And, pardon, but calling people Ding, Dong, and Meow takes me out of the story the first few mentions.) Whether I'd still like The Expanse more if I didn't have this problem in 3BP... hmm, probably yes because there's this 'political correctness' stuff that isn't really my thing, but it would certainly be a close call. ¹ Now that I look it up on Wikipedia, it's apparently spelled Shi Qiang and Da Shi. (Original spelling is from memory, last time I listened to the books was about a year ago)

Lewton 4y ago

My “favorite” part of the trilogy, is when a character in the book praises the writing and quality of a couple of fairytales that are part of the plot and written in the book As in.. Cixin literally calling his own writing great and patting himself on the back

lucb1e 4y ago
It's a plot point that these stories are well-liked. The stories themselves are objectively simplistic, but in the minds of the party to whom they are supposed to be good (trying to avoid spoilers here), it can make sense that they would like them. I didn't cynically read it as the author saying their own stories are so amazing. I do think the embedded extra meanings are well-made. Whether it would actually work and remain undiscovered by the aforementioned party is a bit besides the point for me: the fact that the author made it work at all is nicely done. A lot of 'bad' writers show only reactions and never more than shards of the actual text to avoid having to make something that lives up to the claims.
- Lewton 4y ago
  You gotta admit, it's pretty funny though And to your edit, I agree, the fairytales were a highlight of the book
andrewf 4y ago
The characters in Tolkien's books really liked singing Tolkien's songs.
WiSaGaN 4y ago
In fact, Liu was found praising his own books in a forum using burner accounts after the publication, and also reminding people that the Hugo award the novel received was "huge in the Western sci-fi world". He was probably truly happy when Obama said he was a fan.

ss108 4y ago

I was going to read his books, but then discovered he parrots Chinese government propaganda about the Uighur genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin#Political_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin#Political_views

moloch-hai 4y ago
He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books. He has hypothetical future governments doing things arguably worse. Fiction is largely about fictional people doing bad things, or being forestalled trying them.
- ss108 4y ago
  > He does not mention Uighur genocide in his books. So? lol "It's ok if he believes putting certain people in concentration camps is good so long as he doesn't mention that in his books"
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    We don't know what he believes. We only know he is obliged to say what keeps him out of a re-education camp. What would you be saying, in his position? Be honest.
    - ivanstojic 4y ago
      This is true, but only by omission: we don't know everything he believes. We do know he publicly supports the genocide in order to protect himself. MLK day is around the corner. It's worth considering what it cost some people to do the right thing, vs what some people got paid to support the wrong thing.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        Let us consider what it cost MLK, and whether we demand that of everybody. I favor applauding people for speaking out in risky circumstances. Condemning them for failing to risk what we need not is questionable.

p-e-w 4y ago

Ironically, buried in a footnote at the end of the article is a reference to the only technology that will actually matter in the future: "All images generated with Midjourney."

alex_suzuki 4y ago

I extremely enjoyed the trilogy, was hesitant at first because I‘ve never read Chinese sci-fi. One thing I enjoyed reading about was the whole concept of the „Dark Forest“: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

Semaphor 4y ago

Sidebar: For anyone who liked it, and wants a related, a bit more "out there" story: The Redemption of Time is fan fiction, but the novel has been officially blessed by the author and published by the original publisher, and later by Tor in English. It’s not quite on the level, writing wise, but quite close. This sequel takes place so many years in the future, that it’s buttery-soft sci-fi, though. I still enjoyed it.

lucb1e 4y ago
Redemption of Time really disappointed me tbh. I'd much rather than the original author wrote more than rubber stamping this fan fic.
- sylens 4y ago
  I think there are some good ideas in Redemption of Time (like what was the real cause of the Trisolaran cultural reflection) but the last third of it just goes off the rails

thehm 4y ago

Nice graphics, but the article misses what was the most interesting new (to me) idea in the books: the Droplets, which are made of "strong interaction" material so dense that miniscule amounts can destroy planets. I'd love to read more about this idea.

vincelt 4y ago
True! I missed this one. Will read a bit on it and add an edit.
aortega 4y ago
There are much more ideas, I.E. (Spoilers!) dimensional attacks, slow light-speed areas and their effects, math attacks, destruction of the fabric of spacetime, nano-scale multi-dimensional computers, whole universes trapped inside elemental particles, etc. There are so many interesting plots that each one could be an entire book on his own.

jefc1111 4y ago

I read the trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. But yes, not exactly hard sci-fi through and through. My favourite idea wasn't even really a sci-fi thing. I really liked the idea of the Wallfacers. Really clever bit of storytelling, I thought. https://three-body-problem.fandom.com/wiki/Wallfacer https://three-body-problem.fandom.com/wiki/Wallfacer (spoilers, I guess)

Viliam1234 4y ago
The Wallfacers were amazing. I also liked how "no good deed goes unpunished" applies to everyone who saves humanity from extinction. I suspect this is the part that actually rubs most people the wrong way.

moloch-hai 4y ago

SpaceX's Starship+Superheavy ("can+kicker", informally) promises $100/kg to orbit. (Musk is on record lying that it might be $20/kg.) So, the space elevator would need to do much better than $50/kg. Anyway there are better alternatives than the space elevator that have the advantage of being, y'know, possible. The orbiting, rotating "skyhook" concept, that dips down to snatch a payload from the upper atmosphere and fling it to space, is one. A ring-shaped version, rolling, might be more structurally practical. None of the ideas cited in the article originate from Liu. He riffs on them. What would make them more interesting would be knowing how to achieve them. But we don't. People are working on some of them. Some are just bad ideas, the Neptune one spectacularly so.

vincelt 4y ago
Thanks! Will add an edit mentioning your points on the elevator. As for the Neptune idea, assuming 200+ years of technological progress in chemistry and physics, isn't there something that could be remotely viable about the idea? (Not fixating on Neptune in particular, but as in using materials from other planets.)
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  An advantage of alternatives to rockets would be that they do not contribute to destroying the ozone layer. Restoring the ozone layer by dispersing ozone could be a useful idea, but all it requires of material is oxygen, which we have plenty of right here. Neptune has nothing extra we need. The sun turns oxygen into ozone by the gigaton, today. To really address the problem, you would need to remove the fluorine compounds that consume the ozone. Nobody seems to have a better idea than not to vent more. The space elevator notion relies on discovering a material strong enough to build it of. Other schemes seem possible with existing materials. Neptune has helium-3 that might someday be useful as fuel for aneutronic fusion, if we can get that to work. Hardly anybody is trying. Getting to Neptune and collecting it seems even harder than getting aneutronic fusion working.
  - dmix 4y ago
    It sounds like Skyhooks still need lots of rockets to reach the hook, just much less fuel needed to burn per trip. > A skyhook differs from a geostationary orbit space elevator in that a skyhook would be much shorter and would not come in contact with the surface of the Earth. A skyhook would require a suborbital launch vehicle to reach its lower end, while a space elevator would not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)?oldformat=true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)?oldformat=...

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

Really loved this trilogy, sure there might be some inconsistencies here and there, but it's still pretty much hard sci-fi or borderline so and more importantly I don't know any other sci-fi books which are so intense like this one. Relentless twists, there is really little time to be bored.

pharmakom 4y ago

The AI generated images were excellent. I love that the cost of such concept images has come way, way down.

vincelt 4y ago
Thank you! I did spent a substantial amount of time playing with prompts, variations and upscales to try and get decent results. The space elevator one for example, way harder than I thought. Still not fully satisfied but good enough.
detritus 4y ago
Myeh, they're clearly AI-generated but that's not my complaint here - the absolute inconsistency in style and ultimate lack of 'overall style' or visual grammar's what bugs here. It may as well be a poorly-considered selection of clip art, from multiple disparate sources as used to be a problem back in the 90s. It'll take a while for people to get used to considering graphic generation as more than mere visual placeholders, I suppose. Early days.
- vincelt 4y ago
  Yes, I struggled to get a semblant of similar styles between the pictures, despite the same suffixes or playing with 'remixes'. Sometimes, adding one extra word to the prompt (even though it doesn't describe the style) will change the whole visual style or change the thing you're trying to highlight. It was my first time with Midjourney, I'm sure there are tricks to improve on that. Might revisit the images, I do agree that the styling inconsistencies don't look too good.
  - detritus 4y ago
    As a 'sometime designer' who has dabbled in MJ quite a lot, I'd suggest taking the outputs and then running them through something like Photoshop and tweaking them in there to get them to somehow match a bit more - eg. you could add a texture, or halftone them, or alter the hue and saturation to standardise them a bit. Whilst MJ can texturise things, it does tend to fall over a bit when doing so. Good luck!

ur-whale 4y ago

Worth noting, the sentence at the end of the article: > All images generated with Midjourney. Amazing.

sixstringtheory 4y ago

I loved the trilogy even though I agree with various criticisms discussed here. But I think those can be easily forgiven if you’re trying to see the forest (heh) instead of the trees. Yes the mechanics of reading are kind of a slog due to the translation, and constant repetition of full character names. You just have to figure out how to efficiently read it. And there are plenty of scientific and technological incongruities, of the form “if they had the tech to do X, why do they still do Y?” Sometimes there was a narrative reason for such, and the rest I just left to entertainment value while consuming a social commentary. It was the first time I think encountering some narrative devices which I enjoyed. I liked seeing the dialogue with Trisolarans that appear in a sans-serif font. I liked the excerpts from A Past Outside of Time in Death’s End, although sometimes they wind up sort of repeating what had just happened in the previous chapter. Also the fairy tales in Death’s End I thought were some of the best writing and devices in the whole series.

tlb 4y ago

I'm disappointed by the slow progress in cryo-suspension. It seems like it should be possible, and would be very useful on earth too. You could just hop however many years into the future. It'd have fascinating social implications if people could do that. The main problem is apparently that ice crystals grow and damage cell membranes. Surprising that that should be so unsolvable.

tgv 4y ago
Why should it be possible? We weren't built for that. The stories about the bodies that have actually been frozen are horrifying. And I don't see the use, apart from personal curiosity. But imagine yourself waking up, 200 years in the future (if anyone would be willing to thaw you): you're an old, penniless, and clueless body without papers, adding extra weight to a world that has its own problems. People will still be people, so you're not going to like it.
- tlb 4y ago
  "We weren't built for it" isn't really an argument. There are so many counterexamples of things we weren't built for but are popular. It lets you make a bet on the future being better. Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago be mightily impressed by today's level of technology and prosperity? The bet can go badly, of course. The world might get worse. But it's a reasonable bet to make if you believe in continued progress.
  - tgv 4y ago
    > Wouldn't a guy who froze himself 100 or 200 years ago That would have been 1823. No electricity, no cars, no running water, let alone computers and digital payment, and probably a pretty different dialect. He would be homeless. Imagine being someone like Rockefeller ending up between homeless immigrants and gangs. No matter how much progress society has made, that person wouldn't enjoy it.

bookofjoe 4y ago

Coming this year: https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-three-body-problem-netflix-season-1-everything-we-know-so-far-10-2022/ https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/the-three-body-problem...

asgerhb 4y ago

The space elevator. Ah yes, famously introduced in Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest.

sylens 4y ago

I am a huge fan of the trilogy but it's because I accept it for what it is. Most of the characters are not that well written and do not have satisfying arcs; instead, they are merely there to push the plot in a certain direction at the required moment. I also didn't think that the technologies got too fantastical until Death's End, where everybody inside the solar system as well as outside of it are experiencing new things every 25 pages or so. I still think back to the trilogy as different events over the last few years. Looking back at the actions and habits some people started during the early weeks of the pandemic (washing groceries) feels a lot like humans at the end of the Dark Forest looked back at the early years of the Crisis Era - a lot of grasping at straws and trying to give the appearance of doing something. And it's very easy to see how people would turn against Escapism in the end.

molly0 4y ago

Liu Cixin manages to write a great sci-fi trilogy with an interesting global plot without pissing of the chines communist party - that's what I find really impressive.

izzydata 4y ago

I'm pretty confident that it is intentionally not about the characters. People are so used to stories where specific characters are individual saviors of everyone else, but I don't think that is the purpose of the characters in this story. There just needs to be characters to help guide the story and have a lens to view the world through, but who they are and what they want is not the purpose of the book. It's more about the collective response of humanity to situations and any individuals perspective is not that important. This was one of the things that I actually really enjoyed about this series. I really don't think a book that is as grandiose as this where the entire world, solar system and universe are at stake can have an individual savior like a super man.

evrydayhustling 4y ago

I liked the illustrations on this post. Where are they from?

avmich 4y ago

The space elevator has an unsolved problem of colliding with satellites in space, so even if we find a good material to build it, it won't work.

wwarner 4y ago

I thought this trilogy was full of fresh takes. For one thing, it’s written from a Chinese pov, so things like the cultural revolution and appeal of authoritarianism are big themes. Second, it’s full of dry humor. It’s hysterical when aliens’ super weapon doesn’t work, over and over again. Third, it toys with issues in the philosophy of science, like how how our view of reality can change because of long periods of comfort or difficulty, or just boredom too, even though reality hasn’t changed at all. I would read more of these if he wrote them.

bwanab 4y ago

The space elevator was proposed by Arthur C. Clarke in Fountains of Paradise in 1979. That said, I do love Cixin Liu's work even if I don't love his prose.

Mikho 4y ago

For those who enjoyed the trilogy, there is a fourth book "The Redemption of Time: A Three-Body Problem Novel" written by Baoshu [1]. Originally one of the first fanfics by the Chinese sci fi author. Later approved by Liu Cixin himself for publishing and translated into English by the same sci fi author Ken Liu who also translated the original trilogy. The book envisions the aftermath of the conflict between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans. 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42646354-the-redemption-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42646354-the-redemption-...