6 ms·

Liu Cixin's “The Three-Body Problem” Is Published in the US

87 points by mojoe 12y ago

mojoe 12y ago
I began reading this last night, and was struck by how the analogies and metaphors the author uses make the book feel much different than the American/European science fiction that I'm use to reading. I'm enjoying it a lot.
- walterbell 12y ago
  You may be interested in the work of R.A. Lafferty (http://ralafferty.org http://ralafferty.org) who has a Japanese following (http://hayakawa-online.co.jp/product/books/721412.html http://hayakawa-online.co.jp/product/books/721412.html).
  - mojoe 12y ago
    Are you saying that he writes in a style that fits Japanese culture? I looked at his wikipedia page and it looks like his influences are irish/catholic/native american tall tales. Do you know how he got popular in Japan? In any case he looks interesting, thanks!
    - walterbell 12y ago
      > Do you know how he got popular in Japan? No idea, I've wondered about that as well. He read/spoke about a dozen languages and sort of blazed his own trail. For some reason, his stories received Japanese translations and awards, http://hc2.seikyou.ne.jp/home/DrBr/index.html http://hc2.seikyou.ne.jp/home/DrBr/index.html His work was difficult to find for the last 20 years, but last week all of his short stories became available as an ebook.
    - lobster_johnson 12y ago
      I don't think it's necessarily because of any particular fit, it's just those odd "big in Japan" [1] phenomena where an artist reaches a higher celebrity status in a foreign country, especially in Japan. Lafferty is closer in style to authors like Vonnegut, Dick, Burroughs and Murakami than to more classical scifi writers. Lafferty is an oddity. If you think Vonnegut is a bit of an oddball — that digressive, chatty, ironically self-referential style is not for everyone — then Lafferty is something else again. His writing sometimes borders on schizophrenic ramblings, mixing baroque allegory with Vonnegutian tall tales, flamboyant artifice (Wes Anderson comes to mind, but also Borges) and broad vaudeville comedy, with no attention to realism. However, beneath the oddball exterior is a rather thoughtful humanist. His most well-known novel, Past Master, is masterpiece in which politicians from the future kidnap Thomas More to help fix their utopian society. It sounds like something Alfred Bester (who was also into this sort of colourful, balls-to-the-wall storytelling) could have written, but goes off in an unexpected direction. If you want to read only one thing by Lafferty, I think it should be the short story "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne", one of the finest time-travel paradox stories ever written. It's short, can be read in its entirety on Google Books [2]. (Edit: Actually, Google Books' preview skips two pages, not sure if it's possible to get them.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase) [2] http://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FoU_KMOmkC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=thus+we+frustrate+charlemagne&source=bl&ots=C8LJ3mM0ga&sig=uwlD52BdXB5Fsefwe7hJmPW0f0U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AtpmVMifBrjbsATG84LQAw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=thus%20we%20frustrate%20charlemagne&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FoU_KMOmkC&pg=PA171&lpg=P...
      - walterbell 12y ago
        Try https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-talled-tales---r-a-lafferty https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-tal...
        lobster_johnson 12y ago
        Awesome, thank you!
  - lobster_johnson 12y ago
    Lafferty is amazing. He should be more well known, and deserves a more prominent place outside of science fiction, too.
DaNmarner 12y ago
I grew up reading SciFi in both Mandarin and English. In my impression, though not flawless, this series is the only long-form novel produced in China that can stand among the best SciFi literature in the west. It deserves to reach a larger audience :)
- trevelyan 12y ago
  As a native English speaker fluent in mandarin, I agree.
- imron 12y ago
  Do you have any another Mandarin SciFi that you can recommend?
- mojoe 12y ago
  So you would say that the article is correct about the lack of science fiction authors in China? Are there any other Mandarin SF novels that you would recommend, even if they don't measure up to the level of "The Three-Body Problem"? I grew up reading exclusively western SF (Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein, Vinge, etc) and reading SF is still one of my favorite pastimes. I took some Mandarin language classes in College, and I'd like to try reading some Chinese SF.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Does anyone know how well "aligned" the texts are? It's rare to find good bilingual texts for light reading/studying.
- Hexcles 12y ago
  To those who want to try something else, here is an incomplete (personal) list of famous contemporary Chinese Sci-Fi novel authors: Wang Jinkang (王晋康, quite productive), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆, just started to publish books recent years), Han Song (韩松) To my surprise, when I wrote this list, I suddenly realized how few names I could think of, even after I looked up in a Chinese website Douban ( http://book.douban.com/tag/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A7%91%E5%B9%BB http://book.douban.com/tag/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A7%91%E5%B9... ). The truth is: there are quite a few good Sci-Fi writers with a whole bunch of brilliant Sci-Fi short stories in China, but few of them ever writes full-length novels, not to mention "good" or "famous" ones.
zhaowang 12y ago
As a Chinese working in U.S.. I really enjoyed reading the Chinese version. Now I have another good options to give gifts to my U.S. friends.
eloff 12y ago
I bought it for my upcoming trip. I also bought stars & empire which contains 10 "galactic tales" from popular indy authors. At $.99 it's tough to go wrong on that one. And I have 78 hours of flying and airports, so I need the length...
akfanta 12y ago
It's a great story told by a not-so-great story teller. Hope the translation helps.
twic 12y ago
I read Liu's short story collection "The Wandering Earth" recently, and rather liked it. My roots are in Clarke, Baxter, Niven, etc, and Liu fits right into that denomination. His stories are often a little less refined than in contemporary western SF - plots are often obvious and straightforwardly developed - but the scope and detail of his imagination is fantastic. I would definitely say Liu's writing has a different feel to it than western SF - it feels like the story is always really about the society rather than the individuals who may happen to be the protagonists. However, i knew as i was reading it that he was Chinese, so i can't rule out the possibility that this is confirmation bias. Or, er, racism i suppose. Anyway, i thought "The Wandering Earth" was well worth reading, and highly recommend it.
infruset 12y ago
> The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles. Does anyone know what books the author is referring to?
- pavlov 12y ago
  I guess such recent works as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, among others. Who knew that sci-fi could be something else than alien invasions and scantily clad women in pulp covers?
  - infruset 12y ago
    Thanks! For a while I've had this notion that the best way to understand differences in gender is to picture some situations of everyday life with reversed genders, and then I thought while reading this, maybe there's a sci-fi book doing exactly that? Turns out this is slightly different, but it seems interesting, I'll give it a try.
    - pavlov 12y ago
      Both Le Guin and Ballard are absolutely worth it! To clarify, the snark in my post was not directed at you, but rather the original author's suggestion that these are somehow recent themes in science fiction. It sounded like he had just been revived from cryogenic sleep where he'd spent the last 50 years with a dusty Heinlein novel in his stiff hand :)
- emilng 12y ago
  For more recent examples, check out work by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler. If you can wait, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam series is also apparently getting developed as a TV series for HBO.
- monkeypizza 12y ago
  I think "Mundane SF" is the term you are looking for.
hackuser 12y ago
I was just looking into this book recently; these links may be of interest to everyone: * An essay by the author on Chinese science fiction and his trilogy's place in it (in English): http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/the-worst-of-all-possible-universes-and-the-best-of-all-possible-earths-three-body-and-chinese-science-fiction http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/the-worst-of-all-possible-u... * A very interesting review by a blogger: http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/09/review-of-three-body-problem-by-liu.html http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/09/review-of-three-bod... * A couple professional reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cixin-liu/the-three-body-problem/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cixin-liu/the-thr... http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7653-7706-7 http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7653-7706-7
- stoolpigeon 12y ago
  Scalzi ran a "Big Idea" post on it. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixin/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixin...
brianwillis 12y ago
I'm reading through the sample on my Kindle now. His similes are a little forced ("battles like this one raged across Beijing like a multitude of CPUs working in parallel, their combined output, the Cultural Revolution"), but he does know how to tell a story. By the end of the second chapter I was sold.
- hackuser 12y ago
  Metaphor might not translate easily, either linguistically or culturally.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  That's almost definitely mangling of Chinese idiom puns - suffice to say they are much more succinct in Mandarin.
J_Darnley 12y ago
Oh, this is a novel rather than an academic paper about the physics problem of the same name.
attorney_dcl 12y ago
Do you know that? Liu Cixin is a computer engineer at a power plant in bleak mountain place of Shanxi, China(not far from my hometown). He once wrote a program to write poems!
- attorney_dcl 12y ago
  He mentioned Unix in one of his novel, describe it as "silent, sturdy".

87 points by mojoe 12y ago

mojoe 12y ago

I began reading this last night, and was struck by how the analogies and metaphors the author uses make the book feel much different than the American/European science fiction that I'm use to reading. I'm enjoying it a lot.

walterbell 12y ago
You may be interested in the work of R.A. Lafferty (http://ralafferty.org http://ralafferty.org) who has a Japanese following (http://hayakawa-online.co.jp/product/books/721412.html http://hayakawa-online.co.jp/product/books/721412.html).
- mojoe 12y ago
  Are you saying that he writes in a style that fits Japanese culture? I looked at his wikipedia page and it looks like his influences are irish/catholic/native american tall tales. Do you know how he got popular in Japan? In any case he looks interesting, thanks!
  - walterbell 12y ago
    > Do you know how he got popular in Japan? No idea, I've wondered about that as well. He read/spoke about a dozen languages and sort of blazed his own trail. For some reason, his stories received Japanese translations and awards, http://hc2.seikyou.ne.jp/home/DrBr/index.html http://hc2.seikyou.ne.jp/home/DrBr/index.html His work was difficult to find for the last 20 years, but last week all of his short stories became available as an ebook.
  - lobster_johnson 12y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily because of any particular fit, it's just those odd "big in Japan" [1] phenomena where an artist reaches a higher celebrity status in a foreign country, especially in Japan. Lafferty is closer in style to authors like Vonnegut, Dick, Burroughs and Murakami than to more classical scifi writers. Lafferty is an oddity. If you think Vonnegut is a bit of an oddball — that digressive, chatty, ironically self-referential style is not for everyone — then Lafferty is something else again. His writing sometimes borders on schizophrenic ramblings, mixing baroque allegory with Vonnegutian tall tales, flamboyant artifice (Wes Anderson comes to mind, but also Borges) and broad vaudeville comedy, with no attention to realism. However, beneath the oddball exterior is a rather thoughtful humanist. His most well-known novel, Past Master, is masterpiece in which politicians from the future kidnap Thomas More to help fix their utopian society. It sounds like something Alfred Bester (who was also into this sort of colourful, balls-to-the-wall storytelling) could have written, but goes off in an unexpected direction. If you want to read only one thing by Lafferty, I think it should be the short story "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne", one of the finest time-travel paradox stories ever written. It's short, can be read in its entirety on Google Books [2]. (Edit: Actually, Google Books' preview skips two pages, not sure if it's possible to get them.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase) [2] http://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FoU_KMOmkC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=thus+we+frustrate+charlemagne&source=bl&ots=C8LJ3mM0ga&sig=uwlD52BdXB5Fsefwe7hJmPW0f0U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AtpmVMifBrjbsATG84LQAw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=thus%20we%20frustrate%20charlemagne&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FoU_KMOmkC&pg=PA171&lpg=P...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Try https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-talled-tales---r-a-lafferty https://sites.google.com/site/thebooksofsand/the-man-who-tal...
      - lobster_johnson 12y ago
        Awesome, thank you!
- lobster_johnson 12y ago
  Lafferty is amazing. He should be more well known, and deserves a more prominent place outside of science fiction, too.

DaNmarner 12y ago

I grew up reading SciFi in both Mandarin and English. In my impression, though not flawless, this series is the only long-form novel produced in China that can stand among the best SciFi literature in the west. It deserves to reach a larger audience :)

trevelyan 12y ago
As a native English speaker fluent in mandarin, I agree.
imron 12y ago
Do you have any another Mandarin SciFi that you can recommend?
mojoe 12y ago
So you would say that the article is correct about the lack of science fiction authors in China? Are there any other Mandarin SF novels that you would recommend, even if they don't measure up to the level of "The Three-Body Problem"? I grew up reading exclusively western SF (Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein, Vinge, etc) and reading SF is still one of my favorite pastimes. I took some Mandarin language classes in College, and I'd like to try reading some Chinese SF.
yzzxy 12y ago
Does anyone know how well "aligned" the texts are? It's rare to find good bilingual texts for light reading/studying.
Hexcles 12y ago
To those who want to try something else, here is an incomplete (personal) list of famous contemporary Chinese Sci-Fi novel authors: Wang Jinkang (王晋康, quite productive), Chen Qiufan (陈楸帆, just started to publish books recent years), Han Song (韩松) To my surprise, when I wrote this list, I suddenly realized how few names I could think of, even after I looked up in a Chinese website Douban ( http://book.douban.com/tag/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A7%91%E5%B9%BB http://book.douban.com/tag/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A7%91%E5%B9... ). The truth is: there are quite a few good Sci-Fi writers with a whole bunch of brilliant Sci-Fi short stories in China, but few of them ever writes full-length novels, not to mention "good" or "famous" ones.

zhaowang 12y ago

As a Chinese working in U.S.. I really enjoyed reading the Chinese version. Now I have another good options to give gifts to my U.S. friends.

eloff 12y ago

I bought it for my upcoming trip. I also bought stars & empire which contains 10 "galactic tales" from popular indy authors. At $.99 it's tough to go wrong on that one. And I have 78 hours of flying and airports, so I need the length...

akfanta 12y ago

It's a great story told by a not-so-great story teller. Hope the translation helps.

twic 12y ago

I read Liu's short story collection "The Wandering Earth" recently, and rather liked it. My roots are in Clarke, Baxter, Niven, etc, and Liu fits right into that denomination. His stories are often a little less refined than in contemporary western SF - plots are often obvious and straightforwardly developed - but the scope and detail of his imagination is fantastic. I would definitely say Liu's writing has a different feel to it than western SF - it feels like the story is always really about the society rather than the individuals who may happen to be the protagonists. However, i knew as i was reading it that he was Chinese, so i can't rule out the possibility that this is confirmation bias. Or, er, racism i suppose. Anyway, i thought "The Wandering Earth" was well worth reading, and highly recommend it.

infruset 12y ago

> The series is likely to be a change of pace for science-fiction fans in the United States, where many leading contemporary writers in the genre are rejecting classic alien-invasion plots in favor of those that take on real-world issues like climate change or shifting gender roles. Does anyone know what books the author is referring to?

pavlov 12y ago
I guess such recent works as Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, among others. Who knew that sci-fi could be something else than alien invasions and scantily clad women in pulp covers?
- infruset 12y ago
  Thanks! For a while I've had this notion that the best way to understand differences in gender is to picture some situations of everyday life with reversed genders, and then I thought while reading this, maybe there's a sci-fi book doing exactly that? Turns out this is slightly different, but it seems interesting, I'll give it a try.
  - pavlov 12y ago
    Both Le Guin and Ballard are absolutely worth it! To clarify, the snark in my post was not directed at you, but rather the original author's suggestion that these are somehow recent themes in science fiction. It sounded like he had just been revived from cryogenic sleep where he'd spent the last 50 years with a dusty Heinlein novel in his stiff hand :)
emilng 12y ago
For more recent examples, check out work by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler. If you can wait, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam series is also apparently getting developed as a TV series for HBO.
monkeypizza 12y ago
I think "Mundane SF" is the term you are looking for.

hackuser 12y ago

I was just looking into this book recently; these links may be of interest to everyone: * An essay by the author on Chinese science fiction and his trilogy's place in it (in English): http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/the-worst-of-all-possible-universes-and-the-best-of-all-possible-earths-three-body-and-chinese-science-fiction http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/the-worst-of-all-possible-u... * A very interesting review by a blogger: http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/09/review-of-three-body-problem-by-liu.html http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/09/review-of-three-bod... * A couple professional reviews: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cixin-liu/the-three-body-problem/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cixin-liu/the-thr... http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7653-7706-7 http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7653-7706-7

stoolpigeon 12y ago
Scalzi ran a "Big Idea" post on it. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixin/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/11/11/the-big-idea-liu-cixin...

brianwillis 12y ago

I'm reading through the sample on my Kindle now. His similes are a little forced ("battles like this one raged across Beijing like a multitude of CPUs working in parallel, their combined output, the Cultural Revolution"), but he does know how to tell a story. By the end of the second chapter I was sold.

hackuser 12y ago
Metaphor might not translate easily, either linguistically or culturally.
yzzxy 12y ago
That's almost definitely mangling of Chinese idiom puns - suffice to say they are much more succinct in Mandarin.

J_Darnley 12y ago

Oh, this is a novel rather than an academic paper about the physics problem of the same name.

attorney_dcl 12y ago

Do you know that? Liu Cixin is a computer engineer at a power plant in bleak mountain place of Shanxi, China(not far from my hometown). He once wrote a program to write poems!

attorney_dcl 12y ago
He mentioned Unix in one of his novel, describe it as "silent, sturdy".