Finished reading the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series (i.e. The Three-Body Problem and the other books) and have opinions. WARNING: SPOILERS
Overall I liked it a lot. I felt like the books could’ve been a lot tighter though, and Liu Cixin really needed an editor. Lots of cool ideas, but I did not care about the 3 old guys arguing with each other in the first part of the second book. It gave some background info, but that could’ve been collapsed into a few paragraphs. I also didn’t need the whole backstory of some some ship’s cook whose plot relevance was about 10 seconds long.
I didn’t have my mind blown by the ideas in it. Not that I begrudge people that do, I’m just not lying awake worrying about the dark forest hypothesis. Maybe it’s because there’s not much we can do about it anyways 🤷. I did really like the recasting of string theory’s 11 dimensions as not some beautiful reality of the universe, but as the result of brutal galactic warfare.
I thought the FTL communication was kind of weird for a series that mostly tried to stick to (or at least give lip service to) hard sci-fi. If you haven’t seen it before, this is a good explainer of the problems with FTL communication: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php. In the end, I think it more wants to be cosmic horror than hard sci-fi, which is fine.
One minor nit I have is that at the very end they talk a big deal about making messages last for billions of years, and they arrive at carving messages into stone. Good idea, but even then the message got partially lost. Why not add redundancy and carve it multiple times? I also kind of expecting something “clever”, like writing the message into the genes of the mobile trees or something.
I liked it as a story, but it bothers me that so many people see it as hard sci-fi—it’s basically fantasy written with hard-sf literary tropes.
Oh also, it was kind of strange how little he mentioned AI. I like how he wrote that the AI wasn’t trusted to be a Swordholder because it was “too logical”. Completely missed the boat on ChatGPT. “Write a play in which Harry Potter pressed the button to destroy humanity, and then act it out” or something like that would be all it takes.
It was also strange that hundreds of years in the future, humans are still doing hard manual labor. Where are the robots?
I hope to read it in Chinese one day, and wonder if it will seem very different. The book is much thinner in Chinese, interestingly.