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The government takes away his perfect anime wife as a punishment because he's just loving around instead of saving the world like he's supposed to be doing. His genius master plan for saving the world is mutually assured destruction.
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Apr 10, 2023 21:06
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SimonChris posted:There is a great adaptation of the series oh gently caress yeah SimonChris posted:done entirely in Minecraft, oh gently caress no
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Apr 10, 2023 23:40
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GABA ghoul posted:Hooo boy, a racism accusation. Western sci-fi is of course full of sexism and misogynism, but I don't think you can pull off a mega bestseller with such weird women issues nowadays anymore. The market has become too sensitive to this poo poo. I mean, the incel hero protagonist has this submissive fantasy anime wife that has no soul or inner life of her own and exists only to adore and compliment him and then the government hires a woman to play that anime waifu in real life to motivate him to work because only the incel loser can save the planet from destruction. And all of it is played absolutely 100% straight as a romantic love story, without any hint of self-awareness, irony or criticism. The woman lacks an inner life and is just extremely happy to serve and to save humanity by being an anime waifu. She of course falls in love with him and they have children. Quantum of Phallus posted:please don’t post like this
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Apr 11, 2023 08:21
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Shamefully, I must admit I haven’t read this series, but I took distortion park’s advice and read the Wikipedia summaries of the books. It’s certainly … a lot. At the very least you have to appreciate Liu’s energy — a lot of trilogies will wind up the plot very early and then spend most of their word count winding it down, but Liu just keeps throwing new, paradigm-changing poo poo in. (I particularly enjoy that the entire solar system gets flattened into 2-D, squishing everyone and everything; I doubt any readers saw that one coming.) Are there any other “dark forest“-based works that are worth looking at? I feel that the whole premise says a lot about our current anxieties here on Earth, since it posits that the entire history of the universe is a bloody, desperate war of all against all for limited resources.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:00
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Isn't this a rip off of the book "the killing star?" Edit: ^^ the killing star is a pure exploration of the fact that any fast interstellar starship is indistinguishable from a planet killer.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:53
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Chicken Butt posted:Are there any other “dark forest“-based works that are worth looking at? Lem has some very similar stuff. Most of his work is very pessimistic about the prospect of meaningful contact with alien intelligence. Dark Forest reminds me particularly of 'Fiasco'. Distant future humanity discovers alien radio signals from a close star and organizes a monumental project to send a research expedition there and make contact. As soon as the aliens notice the human ship moving towards them they turn off every loving radio signal on the planet, try to hide and then even to blow up the ship. And it turns out that they are absolutely justified about this cause contact with humanity turns into a disaster for them due to human hubris and anthropocentric and patronizing attitude. Like Dark Forest it's a very exposition heavy book with little focus on the characters and the weird 'mechanics' of the aliens are a central plot point.
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Apr 11, 2023 20:50
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Chicken Butt posted:Shamefully, I must admit I haven’t read this series, but I took distortion park’s advice and read the Wikipedia summaries of the books. What was the point of this post
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Apr 12, 2023 00:50
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Non-GBS version of this thread here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4028868
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Apr 12, 2023 04:15
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Johnny Truant posted:What was the point of this post op exposing themselves as a dumbnass
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Apr 12, 2023 11:33
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Daikatana Ritsu posted:Non-GBS version of this thread here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4028868 Oh nice, I wanna revisit the first book and finish the trilogy. Thoroughly enjoyed it and the movie Quantum of Phallus posted:op exposing themselves as a dumbnass  So wait I'm behind on poo poo, did they finish the first part of adapting 3BP to TV or whatever?
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Apr 12, 2023 14:22
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i think it's out in china
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Apr 12, 2023 14:23
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Benioff and Weiss are still doing one for Netflix afaik
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Apr 12, 2023 15:47
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I thought they were terrible, though with some ok set pieces
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Apr 13, 2023 06:42
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I thought the first book was decent, definitely good material for burning through on a vacation. Planning on finishing the series at some point. Didn't really engage with the debate about depiction of women y'all are talking about. But I also haven't read further. I did think it was interesting how the author depicted the cultural revolution and the role of government. Felt like it walked a fine line in regards to the CCP's take on what's allowed in literature. It's really far from my expertise but I would like to know more to get some context. Notable that the rogueish folksy policeman was depicted as a protagonist.
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Apr 13, 2023 09:55
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Best sci-fi I’ve ever read hands down. I don’t think you should think of them as typical novels with lovable characters and such - they’re almost more like sci-fi philosophy or something. That said, my man Da Shi fuckin rules. They also just feel so… huge. Like I’ve never read anything that feels more epic in scale, has even come close.
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Apr 13, 2023 09:58
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Jakabite posted:Best sci-fi I’ve ever read hands down. I don’t think you should think of them as typical novels with lovable characters and such - they’re almost more like sci-fi philosophy or something. That said, my man Da Shi fuckin rules. They also just feel so… huge. Like I’ve never read anything that feels more epic in scale, has even come close. To me they don't even read like sci-fi, more like some weird fantasy novel with sci-fi aesthetics. I wouldn't call it hard sci fi (e.g. Blindsight or even most of 2001: A Space Odyssey) or particularly interested in the intersection between philosophy and science (le guin, Solaris), politics/identity (banks i suppose, Ancillary Justice) or storytelling/aesthetics (Neuromancer). it's just like a load of "wouldn't it be cool if X worked like Y" where X and Y are random nouns with a science/mathematics tag on wikipedia, but imo Banks does that sort of thing both more convincingly and with dramatically better storytelling.
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Apr 13, 2023 10:26
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Huh, I’d say there’s definitely an intersection with philosophy and science, particularly dimensionality and the limits of perception, and what happens when those limits are tested or broken.
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Apr 13, 2023 10:29
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Jakabite posted:Best sci-fi I’ve ever read hands down. I don’t think you should think of them as typical novels with lovable characters and such - they’re almost more like sci-fi philosophy or something. That said, my man Da Shi fuckin rules. They also just feel so… huge. Like I’ve never read anything that feels more epic in scale, has even come close. yeah
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Apr 13, 2023 10:31
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Fruits of the sea posted:I did think it was interesting how the author depicted the cultural revolution and the role of government. Felt like it walked a fine line in regards to the CCP's take on what's allowed in literature. It's really far from my expertise but I would like to know more to get some context. Notable that the rogueish folksy policeman was depicted as a protagonist. I wanted an entire book focused on this. that felt like a geniunely unique perspective on the cultural revolution. If anyone has suggestions on another contemporary Chinese author with these perspectives from the mainland I'd be very interested.
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Apr 13, 2023 17:06
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Yeah I really liked that bit
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Apr 13, 2023 20:04
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Jakabite posted:Best sci-fi I’ve ever read hands down. I don’t think you should think of them as typical novels with lovable characters and such - they’re almost more like sci-fi philosophy or something. That said, my man Da Shi fuckin rules. They also just feel so… huge. Like I’ve never read anything that feels more epic in scale, has even come close. You might like Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 opus “Last and First Men”. There’s no “story” or characters really; it’s a future history of humans and their evolutionary successors, spanning billions of years. Mind-bending stuff.
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Apr 14, 2023 00:22
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Chicken Butt posted:You might like Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 opus “Last and First Men”. There’s no “story” or characters really; it’s a future history of humans and their evolutionary successors, spanning billions of years. Mind-bending stuff. I should read this actually.
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Apr 14, 2023 01:29
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okay-to-pretty-bad snoozefest after the first half or so of the first book, sorry op. honestly fairly difficult for me to understand what people liked about this so much, but maybe when you're on that uncut greg egan poo poo for long enough cixin's stuff just doesn't hit. the best part of the whole series was the very beginning with the cultural revolution and the tensions therein and once that was over nothing like it ever came back.
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Apr 14, 2023 21:32
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crab computer
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Apr 15, 2023 03:42
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I think one of my favourite moments was the trisolarans just fuckin up making the first sophon, dang that was some cool physics horror poo poo that was just really self contained
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Apr 15, 2023 04:20
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Chicken Butt posted:You might like Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 opus “Last and First Men”. There’s no “story” or characters really; it’s a future history of humans and their evolutionary successors, spanning billions of years. Mind-bending stuff. Thanks, I’ll definitely get on this. I think there are definitely two types of people when it comes to this series, as all the people who bounced off it seem to like the first bits the most, whereas i (and anyone else I know in real life who loves the series) found the first book to the be the worst of the bunch by a good margin, and the series to improve as it continued.
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Apr 15, 2023 10:21
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Jakabite posted:Thanks, I’ll definitely get on this. Count me in the group that bounced off. The first book had some interesting concepts, but I struggled to get through the second book due to completely disagreeing with Liu's base assumptions about how people and the universe works. In a very rare event for me, I just quit the third book completely about 10% of the way in because of how unbelievably poorly written all of the people were. The speculative portion of the science wasn't nearly good enough to keep me interested in it despite everything else. I started the series because I wanted to get a sense of what non-western writers were doing in speculative fiction. In that sense it was an interesting use of time. The good parts were thought provoking in a way that I hadn't experienced. hydroceramics fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 15, 2023 |
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Apr 15, 2023 20:07
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hydroceramics posted:Count me in the group that bounced off. The first book had some interesting concepts, but I struggled to get through the second book due to completely disagreeing with Liu's base assumptions about how people and the universe works. In a very rare event for me, I just quit the third book completely about 10% of the way in because of how unbelievably poorly written all of the people were. The speculative portion of the science wasn't nearly good enough to keep me interested in it despite everything else. This is p much me, I ended up reading all the books, but the last book is nigh unreadable because of how loving utterly brain damaged the author's views on women and "effeminate" men are, it's execrable poo poo and embarrassing to read. The whole series is basically really cool set pieces and exposition dumps of weird, mindbending poo poo, which is then inevitably immediately ruined the instant anything about gender dynamics comes into play, and the second and third book are basically NOTHING but the "hard men lead to easy times, easy times lead to soft men, soft men lead to hard times" vacuous, specious bullshit stretched out over several hundo pages while some people on spaceships play the Dark Knight boat scene with each other. loving wack. I could like, have accepted this if these books were 40+ years older, but this poo poo isn't even ten years old yet and it reads like something from that time period.
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Apr 16, 2023 15:40
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Chicken Butt posted:You might like Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 opus “Last and First Men”. There’s no “story” or characters really; it’s a future history of humans and their evolutionary successors, spanning billions of years. Mind-bending stuff. Yes. The first chapter or so set in the near future may be a tiny bit cringe, but not so bad considering when it was written. The science further on may be a bit outdated (again, this poo poo was written over 90 years ago) but still full of really cool ideas. Umpteen different iterations of "man" across 2 billion years of the solar system's future. You got stuff like "And then the global energy reactor system malfunctioned catastrophically, burning most of the Earth and rendering it completely uninhabitable... except for the polar regions, where a few survivors managed to eke out a living along the shores of the Arctic, falling back to a primitive existence as hunters and fishers. Two million years later the climate had re-stabilized to the point where their descendants could re-populate the planet. By now they were a new species, differing from the previous race of Man in the following ways, which affected the societies they created..." and you don't get this type of thing ONCE but more like a dozen quite different times. And then the dude wrote "Star Maker" which basically starts with a chapter-length summary of the previous book, and then stops dawdling about with petty stuff and really hits the gas pedal.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:43
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Syenite posted:The hard sci-fi was neat but I also remember the author being really obviously misogynistic and homophobic in several places so Dude's also spoken up as a supporter of the Chinese government's genocidal treatment of the Uighurs, for example. And generally seems to be fine with authoritarian politics in the real world.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:10
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Kinda thinking this Chinese guy might be from China
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Apr 17, 2023 16:53
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Space Camp fuckup posted:Kinda thinking this Chinese guy might be from China waoh
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Apr 17, 2023 20:28
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Jakabite posted:Best sci-fi I’ve ever read hands down. I don’t think you should think of them as typical novels with lovable characters and such - they’re almost more like sci-fi philosophy or something. That said, my man Da Shi fuckin rules. They also just feel so… huge. Like I’ve never read anything that feels more epic in scale, has even come close. agreed. the dark forest reveal was so loving sick, as was the "Battle of Darkness". i guess i just fully bought in to all the cool poo poo. 4d puddles, destroying the solar system with a 2d bomb, dark regions... come on! it's awesome Horizon Burning posted:cringe books that everyone insisted they were good because they were translated from chinese which was weird and vaguely patronizing/gaslighting. the dark forest is an entire that'd be done to death years before and i don't know why these books got any kind of attention. i would like to read another book about this idea, please elaborate
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Apr 18, 2023 16:49
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Yeah I didn’t find it too hard to ignore the bad politics. Dimension go boom!!!
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Apr 18, 2023 17:14
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Absolutely chock full of some of the most interesting sci fi concepts I've ever come across in some of the worst prose and plot structure I've ever read. I thought the first one was worth slogging through, couldn't get more than halfway through the second. That may because that they changed translators between the two, because I definitely felt the quality of the writing went down in #2. Wallfacers is a stupid term and the Wallfacers plan is even stupider.
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Apr 18, 2023 20:02
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zoux posted:Absolutely chock full of some of the most interesting sci fi concepts I've ever come across in some of the worst prose and plot structure I've ever read. I thought the first one was worth slogging through, couldn't get more than halfway through the second. That may because that they changed translators between the two, because I definitely felt the quality of the writing went down in #2. Wallfacers is a stupid term and the Wallfacers plan is even stupider. it might be a stupid plan, but it allows the book to create all these interesting mysteries!! (book 2 really picks up in the second half fwiw)
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Apr 18, 2023 21:04
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if you liked the big ideas in 3BP I'd suggest Greg Egan (the GOAT, but be forewarned that his work is pretty much all big ideas and very little connective tissue), Ted Chiang, and Greg Bear (his non-IP stuff obviously)
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Apr 18, 2023 21:11
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I dunno, I thought the wallfacer plan made sense and made for some interesting situations. Particularly the eventual outcome of it
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Apr 18, 2023 21:23
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Can't remember if it was in book 2 or 3, but those two groups of ships that are fleeing the solar system and its likely that they'll be the only humans to remain alive in the future and then they start opening fire on one another. Maybe the bleakest scene I've ever read in any sci-fi.
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Apr 19, 2023 01:48
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Luo Ji ftmfw Jakabite posted:Yeah I didn’t find it too hard to ignore the bad politics. Dimension go boom!!! hell yes OP a.p. dent posted:it might be a stupid plan, but it allows the book to create all these interesting mysteries!! (book 2 really picks up in the second half fwiw) big time. first half of book 2 wasn't too hot.
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Apr 19, 2023 09:02
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