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I just finished Deaths End this morning so I'm experiencing that ponderous glow that you get after reading something thought provoking. Without going into spoi
by jnovek 2y ago
I just finished Deaths End this morning so I'm experiencing that ponderous glow that you get after reading something thought provoking.
Without going into spoilers, Death's End makes everything so... huge. It really made me feel tiny in our universe.
These are good books with some flaws. You should read them.
- mvdtnz 2y agoI absolutely loved the whole series. I have never been as disappointed at a screen adaptation as I was at the netflix show. I couldn't get past episode 2. Terrible.
- perihelions 2y agoYou haven't watched many Netflix adaptations! If the sensation of being banished from 10-dimensional cosmological heavens down into dead 3-dimensional purgatories could be meaningfully be experienced by humans, that ineffable tragedy, it would be the sensation of being forced to watch the Netflix flattening of a book you once dearly enjoyed.
- jitl 2y agoHuh, what were your complaints? I thought they did a pretty decent job - although I finished Death’s End in 2019 so it’s been a while. They preserved the most important parts in my mind, and otherwise the compromises seemed acceptable. I had low expectations and was pleasantly surprised.
- mvdtnz 2y agoThe splitting of the main character (who was a humble middle aged Chinese scientist) into 4 pointlessly racially diverse beautiful young people who somehow represent the apex of the scientific community (and a snack company for some reason). The total butchering of interesting concepts, for example the usage of the sun as an amplifier which, while based on some hand-wavey fictional science, was quite fleshed out in the book, turned into an utterly ridiculous scene where characters literally wrote out an equation on a blackboard that amounted to "a + b = c" (I'm not exaggerating) and you could practically see the mathematical symbols floating around their heads like that Zach Galifianakis meme. But most of all it is the shit dialog. I don't remember the books trying to force sciency sounding words into every fucking line of dialogue. This show is determined to make very stupid people think "wow this is smart".
- jtgverde 2y agoIt's interesting that your primary criticism is that the scientists are too diverse...truly a struggle for me to see why that's such an abhorrent error Personally I thought they did a good job at adapting a book that I thought would be nearly impossible to transform into a "pop" sci fi series.
- mvdtnz 2y agoThat's not my primary criticism. I literally prefaced my primary criticism with "But most of all". It's an "abhorrent error" because the themes of the books were deeply tied to the Chinese heritage and culture of the author and his characters.
- jnovek 2y agoSame here, I've watched to episode 4 (the scene with the boat is in episode 5 and I just didn't want to watch that on a screen). I can understand the desire to humanize the characters for the show, but the characters feel like a CW teen drama. I don't mind that they added some drama, but the drama they added was bad.
- FrustratedMonky 2y agoMaybe expectations were too high? I thought it followed book 1 pretty closely. As book-movie translation go. I thought the choices they made in 3-Body were better than the tradeoffs in Dune 2. But I liked Dune 2 as a movie, but leaving out the Spacing Guild, and how the Water of Life can poison Sand Worms, and they change to the Atomics. It changed entire dynamic on the stand off with Emperor. And leaving out Alia. The only problem with 3-Body, is for season 1, they did stuff too much into it from Book 2, not that it was bad to do it, but maybe needed 1-2 more episodes, instead if felt rushed.
- davely 2y agoI was so excited for the show I went back and binge read all 3 books over the month of March. I really enjoyed them! …I feel like the show is so convoluted and confusing (by design, I understand they’re trying to have this sense of mystery) that someone who hasn’t read the books would be totally lost. I’m still watching, but I had higher hopes for it.
- justinhj 2y agoFully enjoyed both the books and Netflix adaptation. In fact I am surprised how well they made an entertaining tv series of this material that will appeal to a wide audience. My only criticism would be how fast they went through the story.
- drawkward 2y agoI recommend watching the Tencent-produced Chinese adaptation, free on YouTube. It hewed very closely to the novel.
- mrybczyn 2y agoWatch the Tencent adaptation - like 30 episodes on just the first book (with subtitles). Really well done and faithful to the first novel.
- bookofjoe 2y agoYes!
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI personally thought it was blindingly obvious that the show would be bad, to the point I haven't bothered watching. Not only are the books kinda hard to translate to TV, but the people in charge are the guys who did Game of Thrones. The train wreck that show turned into gave me no confidence that they could do a good job with an even more difficult adaptation.
- emmelaich 2y agoI read the books and enjoyed them but there's a few dead-ends and the plot is a bit meandering. I thought the TV series was great.
- bookofjoe 2y agoTry the 30-episode Chinese version: it's superb.
- peteforde 2y agoMy friend and I had a hard time staying awake through the first episode. It was just incredibly slow. Each to their own.
- m3kw9 2y agoEvery book ever has flaws
- stcredzero 2y agoOne thing I've noticed about Liu Cixin's books, is that for people who follow futurism and hard Sci-fi beyond the shallow level of a typical mainstream layperson, there are huge glaring plotholes. Here's perhaps the big one: Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into building space industrial infrastructure space colonies? This also applies to The Wandering Earth.
- jnovek 2y agoThe decisions made in Death's End in particular are very frustrating but I think the point was that humanity's biggest barrier to reaching the stars is itself.
- marcellus23 2y agoIn general, I get the feeling that the people who gush about all the awesome ideas in the 3BP books, are not people who read very much sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But those ideas have been explored previously, and much better (IMO), in other less popular books.
- jnovek 2y agoThat's fair -- I read some here and there but I recognize that I'm not a hardcore sci-fi reader. You mentioned that there are other, lesser known books that explore the same ideas in a more compelling way. Can you give some examples so I can add them to my reading list?
- marcellus23 2y agoFor an exploration of the dark forest theory at least, I recommend The Killing Star. Fair warning though, it’s extremely bleak.
- pokstad 2y agoThe fourth book blessed by the original author is also great. Don’t sleep on that.
- wilsonnb3 2y agoIMO it’s way more than “some flaws”. I bought into the hype and finally read the first book recently. The plot, prose, the characters, literally everything except a couple of really neat sci-fi ideas is comically poor. So bad that you start to wonder if you accidentally rented 2007’s Transmorphers at Blockbuster instead of Transformers.
- ospray 2y agoThe series gets better don't stop at the first book.
- jnovek 2y agoFYI, the first half of the second book is very slow and somewhat cringe at times. You just have to plow through because the back-half of the second book + the third book are a wild ride that's totally worth it.
- irowe 2y agoI'd agree that the second book has the highest cringe per page. The Luo Ji character was laughably bad.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI definitely feel like the series gets worse as it goes on. The first book is incredible though, so it's hard to really go up from there. IMO the first book in that series deserves every bit of accolade it gets and then some.
- lmm 2y agoThe first book is what, 500 pages? That's too much time to spend reading crap. I was ready to give up about a third of the way through but people told me it got better so I carried on (and I foolishly assumed there must be some reason it run the Hugo). It did not get better.
- Izikiel43 2y ago
- burnte 2y ago> These are good books with some flaws. You should read them. Counter view-point: These are bad books with a few thought provoking ideas that are never explored, left behind to explore a ridiculous plot full of nonsensical actions taken by paper cutout characters chasing a political goals that also make no sense. Granted I didn't read the third book, but that's because I gave up not halfway through book 2. When I got to the end of book 1, I had no emotional attachment to any of the characters due to the poor writing, but some of the ideas were interesting, so I opened book 2. As it went on it became harder and harder to tolerate the incomprehensible motivations, stilted dialog, and the scope creep of the story, so I read the Wikipedia summary, and promptly realized I was right to stop reading the books. Yes, the end makes you feel tiny, so tiny that it's impossible to connect the start of the books with the ending, plus the way it ends makes you feel like there was no point to anything to start with. In my opinion the only way it could have been worse was if it was all just a dream/snowglobe all along. Nothing is ever resolved, just a few neat ideas sprinkled out with outrageous nonsense, and the stakes keep getting higher and higher until the universe itself is no longer big enough for the ending. I truly think they're bad books, I haven't read anything this bad since Atlas Shrugged. That said, I'm glad that other people enjoy them, and I'm not trying to say people who enjoy them are wrong only that like all art, beauty is in the eye of the reader.
- luyu_wu 2y agoI think some of this is definetly due to lacking translation. The general consensus among fans is also that the first book is the least interesting, while the second and third become far better. IMO this is because the only role of the first book is a general setup with few Sci-Fi elements, of which all are hard!
- jnovek 2y agoI think your criticisms are legit. I think the books are love 'em or hate 'em. Like you I never connected to any of the characters, but the direction of the story and its almost exponential growth in scale was what drew me in. But c'mon, almost nothing is as bad as Atlus Shrugged (aside from maybe The Fountainhead). :-P
- 2y ago
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI liked the books overall but I didn't really care for a lot of Death's End. Hard to get into why without spoilers, of course. But personally I felt that the quality of each book in the series was worse than the one before. That said, the first book was incredibly good so even if they get worse as they go the series is quite good overall.
- jmccarthy 2y agoI also finished Death's End this morning and have a similar afterglow re: scale (energy, space, time)!
- Izikiel43 2y agoI didn't like the ending, but redemption of time gives a closure overall more to my liking
- davidw 2y ago> makes everything so... huge. It really made me feel tiny in our universe. I have to say... I kind of don't care for the exploding mind variety of sci-fi. I like good stories set in the future with some interesting technology and science that's not in our grasp yet, but still stories about people rather than 'wooooaaaahh' stuff.
- Arainach 2y agoLiu's trilogy absolutely centers around people, not technology.