9 ms·
You can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band o
by icambron 4y ago
You can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band of faint stars could be a gravitationally rotating disk seen from the inside, and what if those other oblong smudges we see are entire other disks really really far away?"
For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me, would be hard to have!
- Helmut10001 4y agoThis is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
- mach1ne 4y agoI’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
- mrexroad 4y agoYep. Some good sci-fi. Each one is a bit different, but terrific. Funny enough I was thinking earlier this week that I should re-read them since it’s been a number of years.
- htag 4y agoIt's a three book series. It has a prequel, which adds little to the trilogy. It's highly awarded. It's interesting in that it was originally written in Chinese and it's uncommon for a translated book to make this big of an impact in sci-fi circles. You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.
- riffraff 4y agoI had a hard time getting through book 1, the other two in the trilogy are easier to read, but they're certainly entertaining and original. It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.
- Larrikin 4y agoI've had good success with the audiobook + ebook combo in general. I'll listen to an audiobook while cooking, showering, etc and read it physically on a tablet or my phone when I want. I started reading the first book before I started using this method, and abandoned the series a couple times but saw it coming up so often in sci-fi recommendations I kept wanting to get through it I found the first half of book one elicited no interest in reading in my down time, but was just barely interesting enough to not quit listening. By the second half of book one and the entire rest of the series (plus the author approved fan fiction fourth book) I completely gave up on the audiobook because the story was so good that I wanted to read it as quickly as possible. I actually switched to reading on my phone in the shower over listening. It starts off slow but gets good and stays extremely good. One of my favorite series.
- fooker 4y agoIf you are have already read a bunch o sci-fi books, yes. Otherwise it'll be like drinking from a firehose.
- Helmut10001 4y agoI really liked the first book, towards the second and third it got a little bit slow and repetitive. Not anywhere on par with e.g. Hyperion Cantos, but otherwise very good read.
- baq 4y agoThere’s very little which holds ground versus Hyperion though… so GP if you haven’t already, go read that
- lmm 4y agoNo. It's a tedious slog, devoid of interest on any axis: characters, plot, worldbuilding and science are all paper-thin. Its popularity baffles me.
- colordrops 4y agoIt's popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was the first proper scifi novel written in the native tongue of over a billion people.
- richardw 4y agoWhat is “proper” vs eg the others on this list? Honest question. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_science_fiction
- colordrops 4y agoDid you read the wiki link? There's very little, and much of it is more kafka-esque political commentary rather than hard scifi. I don't know, I lived in China for 9 years, and scifi and fantasy media were highly discouraged by the party (as mentioned in the wiki link), and no one I knew had anything to recommend that was originally written in Chinese. When Three Body Problem came out, people went nuts. Every nerd and engineer in the country read it.
- richardw 4y agoThank you. It’s amazing that +1bn people with theoretical access to the world’s resources didn’t spontaneously create 10000 sci-fi books. Similar isolation the other way around. Societies are still so isolated (language, culture, political leanings) despite so much integration.
- dTal 4y ago>theoretical access to the world’s resources There's the rub. Access to the world's cultural resources is highly limited in China. They've outright firewalled the internet.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoI read maybe half of the first book, and it was so bad I had to put it down. Maybe the translation is dry, or maybe the thin, stereotypical characters wore on me.
- jacquesm 4y agoFrom the perspective of someone who has read 100's of SF books: not really. But if you haven't or if you want to have a taste of what looking at SF through a Chinese lens would look like then it's probably worth it.
- maneesh 4y agoThe best sci-fi trilogy I’ve ever read. I don’t know why there is a lot of hate on hn towards it.
- baq 4y agoIt's written with a different focus than traditional western sci-fi. Pacing is different, characters are unexpected in certain ways, etc. I can see how people don't like the style, I personally enjoyed the 'something different'.
- Reubachi 4y agoSome recommendations based on that: The Forever War trilogy is IMO the best "future war" mil sci fi series. The standalone book Old Man's War is also incredible. And of course....Hyperion is the king of the entire genre. If you haven't read those I'd highly recommend it, will change your life.
- QuesnayJr 4y agoYes. It's the best science fiction I've read in years. If you go in expecting adventure fiction, then it's not enjoyable. It's more like reading something like Olaf Stapledon.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cdelsolar 4y agoBooks 2 and 3 were some of the best books I've _ever_ read.