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Comment by alexitorg | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed the Three body Problem. It reminded me of post war US science fiction novel. Simplistic aliens who are clearly our foes, heroic male leads, paper thin female characters and a bit of the confident can do swagger that comes with a booming economy.

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It clearly isn't a character-based story. But the aliens aren't clearly our foes, males and females do good and bad, and it explores some themes in relation to the "Great Leap Forward" and societal hierarchy that weren't so badly written...

I guess my own critique would be that the style maybe didn't survive the translation. To each his own :p

The premise itself was good (especially in the second book) and I think the female characters were fine. I enjoyed the trilogy.

I think literally all truly catastrophic events in the book were caused by females acting like immature children. They don't really suffer any consequences of their actions - nothing comparable to the magnitude of their sins - others do.

It's an extremely antifeminist trilogy and clearly intended to be so. The alternative apt title would be 'How feminism destroys civilizations'.

I don't think there's a spoiler tag on HN, so I wrote it as vaguely as it can be without spoiling the story.

(please note I'm just describing how the book is, not making a statement about feminism)

I totally agree, it gets more weird as the trilogy advances as well. I really liked the basic premise, but at some point it becomes painful to read how in the far future all the men look like women and that's why humanity is weak.

I didn't get that impression. More of a "people are idiots", which felt weirdly realistic (in the same way as the portrayal of Julia Bliss Flaherty in Seveneves was essentially the sad but realistic image of a politician I come to expect). I guess you could see antifeminism in either, if you really go in looking for it - but that says more about reader's preconceptions than about the book itself.

Given the cultural context of the book and the author, "humans are fuckups" is a fully justified worldview, IMO (even though I'd prefer more "humans are awesome" literature; Liu Cixin's trilogy was really depressing).

In Seveneves, any negative portrayal of any particular woman was massively counterbalanced by the narrative of, ummm, the seven Eves. What female character in 3BP trilogy balances the disastrous actions of Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin, the two most consequential female characters?

Granted, the disastrous action of Ye was somewhat offset by the inspiration she gave Luo Ji. (In the long run, she was still responsible for the deaths of billions.) But Cheng is something else entirely. The plot of a book is entirely up to its author. The time scale portrayed is many hundreds of years. It would have been possible to have conjured up a male character to take at least one of the several treacherous and/or civilization-destroying actions Cheng took. Maybe the character of Wade could have been that, but in retrospect even this clumsy caricature of an amoral reptilian white American CIA asshole always made the right choices with respect to the survival of humanity.

I really enjoyed the trilogy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have this specific flaw (and several others besides). Reading antifeminism is not the reader's fault; it's right there in the text.

That hardly sounds like a recommendation.

And it's also completely nonsense. Hardly any of the listed characteristic applies to the first book (3BP), and none of them apply to the trilogy as a whole.

It's a very apt description.

Interesting and I agree, China is actually a lot like the US. Arrogant, self-righteous and dismissive. Not one iota of critical introspection.

I found it similar in style to the Foundation trilogy; trying to be very scientific but with very weak characters.

But the science was pure nonsense too. And not interesting nonsense. The videogame works by magic. The alien "protons" work by magic. The alien biology works by magic. It's not "what would the logical consequences be if the universe worked like this", it's just a bunch of stuff, tedious nonsense that means nothing.

I hate the book (and while the people who told me it got better fooled me once, I'm certainly not going to read the other two and let them fool me twice) and can't understand where all the praise comes from.

In my opinion the first book is a mere introduction to what happens in the second one were really many opened questions and strategies take place.

Aye, Liu Cixin's biggest impact on speculative fiction thought was the Dark Forest's answer to Fermi's Paradox.

I'm not sure that it was that original. Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space had a pretty similar answer (everyone's staying quiet because Bad Things happen if you don't) and he acknowledges influence from Gregory Benford's stuff, say. The explicit game theory approach in the Three Body Problem was kind of new, I suppose.

The ideas are far from complex enough to require people to suffer through the first book, just to get the necessary context.

I think there's probably a decent short story to be extracted from the key idea in the second book.

Is not a science book, what is the level of complexity needed for a book to be interesting?, In my opinion, just with the first book that is quite simple since the title gives you the main topic, made my mind wonder about many of the topics, like how another civilization adapts to the hardships of their environment, the naivety of humanity on contacting aliens, the cult behaviour that comes from it.

At no point it felt for me like a waste of time, I agree most of the characters are bland, but the questions opened in the book are all societal, not about the individuals themselves.

> can't understand where all the praise comes from.

Probably from the other two. I've read them all one after the other, so when I talk about 3BP, I have trouble separating the book from the larger trilogy.

> The videogame works by magic.

What was magical about it? I don't remember anything especially weird here.

> The alien "protons" work by magic.

This was explained in detail (modulo sci-fi magic in the explanation), but I'm not sure if in 3BP or in Dark Forest. Other major tech advantages of the aliens were also explained in the latter books.

> What was magical about it? I don't remember anything especially weird here.

IIRC the general tech level was essentially the recent past, but the technology to support this full-body VR game existed with no other consequences. And I think there was also an implication that it was multiplayer with another star system? (again, through unexplained technology with no other consequences).

As far as I remember (might be wrong, I don't have the book handy), the game was written by humans from the cult that formed around the first, lightspeed-bound, communication with aliens, and it was essentially "artist's impression" of the Trisolarians. The game was, IIRC, a recruiting tool for the cult.

The FTL communication the aliens used in the first book left a really sour taste in my mouth, especially because the plot could easily have worked without it

The videogame parts were tedious (I can't see the point of describing in detail the appearance and behavior of virtual worlds, since they can be programmed to behave in arbitrary ways that are most likely meaningless) - but the second book is amazing, IMHO.

Interesting to see you mentioning Foundation trilogy as an analogue, and in context of characters, with what I understand as an implication that in both cases, "weak characters" were their negative sides. I agree with comparison to Foundation, in that both books were not about characters at all, and that was a feature, not a bug.

With Foundation in particular, I'm perplexed when I see it being criticized for lack of character depth, given that the books literally beat the reader over their head with multiple levels of reminders that the books are about large forces shaping societies, forces infinitely greater than individuals, and the only special thing about particular characters is that they happened to be at the right place and time when large changes happened[0].

[0] - The Mule aside, but (rot13 - spoilers from "Second Foundation") juvyr gur Zhyr qvq chfu uvfgbel va na hacerqvpgnoyr qverpgvba ol iveghr bs uvf vaqvivqhny fcrpvnyarff, nsgre uvf qrngu, tnynpgvp pvivyvmngvbaf erghearq gb gurve abezny ribyhgvba. Rira gur Frpbaq Sbhaqngvba qvqa'g vasyhrapr guvatf zhpu gb guvf cbvag, naq qvqa'g vasyhrapr gurz zhpu cnfg gung cbvag.

Upon review, Asimov had criticism for his plotting: as quoted on geek.com:

In the author’s note for Foundation’s Edge, he says that, upon re-reading his earlier work, “I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No action. No physical suspense… each book in the trilogy had at least two stories and lacked unity.”

That's true. I've seen this quote before. But it's fair - authors are people too, their views and styles evolve. It's worth remembering that Foundation's Edge was published 30 years after the trilogy.

But it's also true that author's opinions after the fact have limited bearing on the work. People like me, who like the Trilogy as they read it, like it for what it is.

I didn't mention Foundation's Edge because, beyond being a bit more action and suspense-packed, it departs a bit from the "no special individuals" rule. Incidentally, it's not the protagonist that's special in my opinion. Spoilers (rot13) follow:

Juvyr gur punenpgref va gur obbx ercrngrqyl zragvba Tbyna Gerivmr'f fcrpvny tvsgf, vg'f erirnyrq gung ur'f bayl fcrpvny va gur Naguebcvp Cevapvcyr'f frafr: ur jnf gur crefba gung unccrarq gb or gur orfg nybat zrgevpf Tnvn jnf vagrerfgrq va, fb ur tbg envyebnqrq vagb orvat n cvibgny punenpgre. Vg'f Tnvn gung'f gur fcrpvny bar, orpnhfr vg'f orra qbvat gur fryrpgvat.

I think what it all really comes down to is the simple fact that Asimov is not a very good writer. I think he would have been among the first to admit it. He had big ideas and wrote well enough to keep the reader engaged so that he could show them off, but that's about it.

Except for The God's Themselves, which feels like he was channeling a better writer.

IIRC he was fairly explicit in the author's note for that one that he was writing something out of his comfort zone.

I never thought I would ever stumble upon something encoded with rot13.

It shows up on HN every now and then (though I wouldn't say it's very common). I use it when discussing potential spoilers for books/shows, because HN doesn't have a "spoiler tag".

Before spoiler tags were a thing that BBs and forums implemented ROT13 was actually a fairly common way to avoid spoiling things.

I appreciate this practice. Here's a useful extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rot13/bahejodllcom...

What in the...? Those are the sorts of things that make you enjoy a novel? Jesus...

[SPOILERS]

Also, all good guys were chinese, and later all characters were chinese. The only people who survived it all were... and so on. 1 westerner there was the bad guy, and executed.

Hollywood has similar issue with US-centric approach btw, not sure how visible from within, but from outside its a long running joke.

It’s a Chinese book, written for a Chinese audience. I don’t know what you expected?

Wade in the third book is a very important US character.

And in Clive Cussler's books, all the good guys were Americans! And all the shifty Europeans/Arabs/Russsians died!

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