Wrapped up the first book after much struggle. Am I crazy for finding it extremely poorly written? Writing aside, the characters suck, the motivations suck, and the scenario building feels like it was tossed together by a 12 year old. I don’t get the hype. Everything is paper thin. The fictional science aspect is the most compelling part but as a cohesive whole it fails to land.
Yeah, I felt it was largely a throwback to 1940s and 1950s western SF. Liu feels a lot like Asimov or early Heinlein. I was thinking it was like the kind of thing that a rapidly industrializing society would write as part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Yeah that’s the context I came at it from as well. It feels like a very Chinese perspective, which is novel compared to what I usually read.
I got a lot out of the excellent English translation, but it absolutely reads differently than a novel written from an English speaking/thinking person, or even when compared to English translated from a Romance or Germanic language.
Damn, that’s a neat take. Hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, the sheer, weird “what would happen if” premise is what kept me reading, so all of the exposition was yummy rather than annoying
Liu’s short stories are all like that, if you get the chance. What if the world had to be moved out of solar orbit? What if a small class of Chinese schoolchildren were chosen to be representative of all humanity? He has these bold, brash concepts that feel like they were written in a USA that felt that the moon was a stepping stone to the stars. Like Heinlein writing about a kid boshing up a spaceship in the yard.
Liu kinda represents a China that can dream really big in the same way.
I think books 2 and 3 could easily be separated into many short stories.
Or probably the other way around, book 1 was so successful that he stuck various unfinished short stories together to make 2 & 3.
Exactly how I felt! The premise and everything was so much fun. Like, the opening “mystery” of why physics seemed broken was such a wildly cool idea and the answer was so neat but opened up more etc.
Interesting, I really hadn’t considered much beyond the political context and hadn’t really thought about the societal ones but now that you mention it, yeah absolutely.