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.
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.
500 pages for me take probably a month or so.
The second book is much better, though, and the third is better still. If you've managed to work your way through the first, it's probably worth checking out the others.
They're nothing mind-blowing. But they're very competently written (unlike the first book, which was loaded with errors,) their scale is reminiscent of Stephen Baxter's grander works, and the trilogy is rather more accessible than a lot of Baxter's stuff.
In our universe, it is impossible.
In the universe of the book, if technology existed to unfold protons, those same protons could be woven into a long fibre, resulting in a material thinner and stronger than anything made from conventional atoms.
Regardless of whether this is a sound argument, it remains purely fictional. =)
Foundation and Dune's premises are much tamer, and neither story collapses entirely if they turn out to be false.
Sophon is downright mundane compared to this.
Dungeons and Dragons has magic, but it has a rule system, with some form of thermodynamics-y like stuff, internal consistency. Dune starts with some rules and largely doesn't violate them (and if it does, that makes it less kinda good).
Kind of?!
And then they send it off and control it remotely using quantum entanglement, except that entanglement, as far as we know, cannot be used to transmit information faster than light, let alone momentum. Furthermore, in order to be effective at anything, the sophon has to observe the world and transmit information back and forth, except that the capture and transmission of any nontrivial amount of information exceeds the mass energy of a proton by several orders of magnitude.
People here saying "well the second book is better"... should have qualified their praise for the first book a bit more because I'm rather disinclined to believe it.
Overall I thought that these were some great and thought-provoking science function ideas wrapped up in an average to poor literary package.
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.
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
I actually made it through The Fountainhead, but just couldn't make it to the end of Atlas Shrugged. I think The Fountainhead could actually be rescued as a story, but Atlas Shrugged is just a bad political manifesto with some narrative elements thrown in. :D
I think this is the fundamental point where people like you who didn't enjoy the books and people like me who deeply did depart. I thought the unfolding scope of the trilogy felt like a logical, justified progression, in the manner of an escalating conflict. Yes it does escalate quickly, but there is a good reason at each scope level that it needs to expand to the next as the conflict spirals out of control and the technology involved improves. And in general I enjoy when things sort of escalate in scope like that, like Akira for instance. Maybe you prefer books that stay at the same scope the entire time but that's a personal preference.
Also I really don't see how the nature of the ending is at all akin to the "it was all a dream" type ending, because it doesn't fundamentally undercut that the things that happened actually did happen, and had consequences. Yes our assumptions about the nature of the fabric of reality are undercut, but not in a way that means that anything that we thought happened didn't actually happen or anything like that, and not in a way that undercuts stakes, if anything the stakes are far greater. And the choice to restart the universe so it can be better again is actually a deeply consequential action with a lot of seeks to it. Likewise I don't see how the larger scope of the later books makes the smaller scope of the earlier ones not meaningful? That's how we got here.
And I think more than enough interesting and unique speculative fiction ideas are introduced, and I think they are explored enough, in a grand and stunning enough fashion, to justify the book, even if they aren't perhaps looked into as deeply as you think they should be, despite the paper thin characters with nonsensical motivations. Especially since the actual political chess/information game between the trisolarans and humans is so interesting.
It ties together loose ends and goes into more detail about what happened to that brain.
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.
Ahem, spoilers. :-)
You made me laugh. I understand this reference as of about 14 hours ago.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
…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.
I thought the TV series was great.
Each to their own.
This also applies to The Wandering Earth.
In most of these cases the outcome is "it makes a less entertaining story". The Anthropic Principle of Literature, if you will.
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?
My favourite one so far was Broken Earth trilogy.
I'm looking for something new and really awesome but I'm not interested in a series with more than 3-4 books (as they rarely keep the same level of quality across the series).
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also good. I haven't read the sequel(s) but the first book can be treated as a standalone, and has some big ideas.
Finally, the Algebraist by Iain M. Banks remains one of my all-time favorites.
Spin, which I mentioned above, takes place entirely on Earth. But it's definitely at least somewhat "space-related" in terms of its plot.
Caves of Steel by Asimov is a certified classic who-dunnit in a far-future underground New York City. If you're interested in golden age scifi at all, this is a great one to check out.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite books of all time. It has a tiny bit of space in it, but the whole book pretty much takes place on a single planet.
Permutation City by Greg Egan is all about computer-simulated consciousness. Thought-provoking but also a bit horrifying.
I also love Fine Structure by qntm (author of Lena[0]). Though it's a bit rough around the edges, I find that every time I pick it up to re-read it, I can't put it down until I'm done.
Those are just some ones I personally like. There's more I could list, but SF is a very wide genre and I have my biases — you should check out /r/printSF for some more broad recommendations maybe.
Funny. I have given up on the book after the first half since it bored me and I had to stop.
I can't remember any, if so. Most likely I have 1-2 audio books.