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Comment by wilsonnb3 | Hacker News Reader

IMO 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.

The first book was not great. I particularly hated that stupid monofilament thing --- it's physically impossible for what should be obvious reasons.

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.

> it's physically impossible for what should be obvious reasons.

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. =)

I watched the Tencent show based on the immense praise here at HN and I agree. The characters especially, but even none of the major plot pieces had any actual bearing on the plot. If you replace the robots in "I, robot" you'd have a completely different work. If you replace the "three body system" in "three body" with an impending nova, or asteroid, or a billion other disasters you'd... still have essentially the same story. What was the point of the game (read: the game's had no real world purpose and was merely a plot device to convolute exposition)? Omnipotent handwavey magic alien technology what?

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.

The series gets better don't stop at the first book.

FYI, 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.

I'd agree that the second book has the highest cringe per page. The Luo Ji character was laughably bad.

I 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.

The 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.

Just a day of reading, it passes by fast, I read the whole tetralogy in 4 days, 1 per book, really liked them

Just understand that not everyone skim reads 500 pages in a day.

500 pages for me take probably a month or so.

It does not.

Even the "neat" sci-fi ideas are often complete nonsense, such as the whole concept of sophons, which leverage a neat fringe idea of theoretical physics while running afoul of boring, well-established physics.

Isn't that true for basically all speculative sci-fi? The point to the form is to pick an idea with "enough plausibility" and extend it to an interesting implication. Not all "sci-fi" can be (or should be) 2001 or The Martian; Foundation and Dune are kinda good books too.

To various extents, yes, but it is easier to suspend one's disbelief about certain things than others. The main issue with sophons is that they routinely have to interact with quantities of energy that should annihilate them: when they are unfolded, for instance, they have to bear the impact of light all over their planet-spanning surface. They are "god-tier" technology, but only because they flaunt basic conservation of energy. I find it harder to suspend my disbelief about that than e.g. faster than light travel.

Foundation and Dune's premises are much tamer, and neither story collapses entirely if they turn out to be false.

Ah yes, eating worm poop is the only thing that allows humans to navigate ships moving at light speed is more plausible.

It is unironically more plausible than etching a supercomputer inside a proton, yes. It's odd, but it's not broken.

Forget lightspeed: melding your body with worms give you first-person access to memories of your ancestors. Like, your ancestors who lived in Ancient Greece. And all others.

Sophon is downright mundane compared to this.

I like fantasy, and there's "believable fantasy" and "unbelievable fantasy". If you start saying the world has some unusual property X and then show the consequences of that, that's believable - maybe in the future there will be some technology, or physics, or whatever that show how a world with X could actually come to be, but it's the starting assumption of the work.

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).

> Foundation and Dune are kinda good books too.

Kind of?!

What's the well-established inner structure of an electron?

I'm not talking about the inner structure, I'm talking about the part where they unfold a proton in such a way that it envelops their entire planet and blocks all incoming light from their sun, meaning that it is continuously absorbing quadrillions of watts of power, although it still has the mass of a proton. It's grotesque, like bouncing off asteroids with gold leaf, but what's telling to me is that I don't think the author thought about it at all.

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.

I couldn't agree with you more.

Yeah, I did enjoy the books, but the characters are not great and the prose pretty basic, the romances fall flat etc. But the more you go on the more interesting science fiction are brought up.

Overall I thought that these were some great and thought-provoking science function ideas wrapped up in an average to poor literary package.

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