the person making a joke premised on the BJ internet lady being stupid is ironically demonstrating their own dull, commonplace “takes”. no winners here
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I finished the Three Body trilogy by Cixin Liu today. Since I only recently started reading regularly again, that was quite the colossal undertaking for me. I really enjoyed my time with the books. I don’t have many reference points in sci-fi literature to compare it to. When it comes to sci-fi, the only books I can remember having read are Ender’s Game and The Left Hand of Darkness which are both much shorter and thus can’t really be compared well to Three Body.
The German translation was very good. Occasionally it had some odd sentence structures that made me trip up but those were few and far between. The book read quite naturally compared to some translations of books from Japanese I’ve read before.
The plot Liu constructed couldn’t be much larger in scope if he tried. Spanning enormous lengths of time, with looks into very different time periods which were well described so that they felt believable and real even if they were highly hypothetical. He definitely has the gift of imagining wild technology and explaining it to the reader so that it feels believably achievable. I know little about physics so it could all absolute lunacy but that doesn’t matter since the story ultimately always focuses more on the impact of said technology than its minutae even if it likes looking under the hood more than other sci-fi does.
I’m honestly surprised with how comparatively few characters Liu was able to construct a story so huge in scope but it definitely made reading, following and remembering the story much easier that pretty much all fantasy I ever read.
Overall the books manage to instill existential dread in me with one little sentence here and there way more often than anything “lovecraftian” ever has. Liu just excels at leading you along a seemingly harmless path of technological steps only to drop the revelation of the horror of this new creation on your head. He does this often enough that at some point you start looking for little, seemingly insubstantial details in his descriptions to better prepare yourself for what’s coming down the road. Sometimes your succeed but that only makes the other surprises more impactful.
The books contain some very tragic and or fundamentally flawed romances that give all the technology and physics the necessary human element to remain entertaining and not get too world builderly.
I’d definitely recommend reading those books if you’re into sci-fi and can stomach the overall length. One of the biggest compliments I can give the trilogy is that it didn’t lose me somewhere along its 2400 pages and got me through to the end with only a little low point at the beginning of book 3.
Of the 9 books I read this year, the trilogy has 800 more pages than the other 6 books combined. I’m now ready to move on and will look for something short without a sequel, lol.
Edit: Oh also the first book made me realize that I really know embarrassingly little about the history of China and the cultural revolution so I’ll have to look into that.
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Alas, I’m about halfway through and this book is written pretty poorly (perhaps because the author’s first language isn’t English) - it’s written for non-gamers, and structurally it just hurtles through gaming history way too selectively, hurling facts in a seemingly noncoherent fashion. Also completely ignores Japanese game developers for the most part (she mentions Nintendo every once in a while). Which like I get in terms of cultural hegemony (not sure if there was anything as relevant as Gamergate to happen in Japan), but still if you’re going to talk about misogyny/racism/et al., how could you ignore that side of history?
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i read techgnosis by erik davis. don’t let the benign cover fool you, this book was like a better sourced, less paranoid and slightly friendlier adam curtis movie. if any of the parts about the internet in hypernormalization interested you, there is a lot to love in this book. if the demiurge yaldabaoth interests you, you would love this book. if the esoteric jesuit teilhard and his theories of the noosphere interest you, you would love this book. if you like tinkering with electronics, you would love this book!
essentially techgnosis explores the history of technology and how it has evolved alongside our ideas of other realms, be those realms religion, platonic ideals, occultism, spirituality, aliens, or otherwise. if you imagine the tools of prehistoric peoples that acted as hybrids, serving animistic functions as well as practical ones, davis argues that we have not changed and our tools are still the same.
this might not be the best book i’ve ever read, but it is definitely one of the easiest to recommend.
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active book thread tonight lol.
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Hell yeah, awesome to see others who enjoyed these crazy books.
I also appreciated the dark sense of humour that showed through some of these moments. Something about the predictability of the end of all of the Three Body VR game sequences being everyone being vaporized by the suns doing something goofy always ended up tickling my funny bone. Or, and you’ll have to apologize for my reference to the English translation, the Trisolaran’s message of “You’re bugs!” at the end of the first book.
Very Ito Junji in playing with that (supposed) intimate link between horror and comedy.
Never read anything else like it!
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I dragged myself through My Year of Rest and Relaxation pretty much begging for a parting in the clouds throughout. It was a challenging mind to be mired in over the course of a few days, some resonance here and there that made me feel uncomfortable, ugly and reflective. The ending was affecting, though by that point it might’ve just been a matter of gasping for air.
I also read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger a few months ago. Like any piece of media that tries to untangle “the issues” of our current polarized political, technological and misinformation climate, it felt so sprawling as to be unfocused, sort of washing over me, but providing enough of a framework throughout as to not leave me feeling completely overwhelmed or directionless. There’s definitely still a sense of empathy and activists pro-action that feels mobilizing. The chapter on her son was beautiful and brought me to tears.
What’s the take from IC on Naomi Klein? I’ve been curious about No Logo for a long time, and wondering if that’s worth a read.
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rest and relaxation is heavy for sure. i actually dislike the ending but consider most of the book to be very effective, even if it wasn’t something i necessarily enjoyed because like you mentioned it’s a bummer.
i read naomi klien’s climate book when it came out and thought it was okay if not shallow. she seems to straddle a weird line between too radical for the libs for not radical enough for the lefties. i haven’t read no logo myself so i can’t say, but it does seem very of it’s time, especially with culture jamming and brands and stuff. i’d think the way the world has further globalized since the late 90’s has changed in some pretty profound ways, but some other stuff undoubtedly still rings true.
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With a name like My Year of Rest and Relaxation how bad could it be
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UPDATE: Oh. I see. The title is meant to be ironic
(shouts out to @MoH for always encouraging me to just go ahead and pluck that low hanging fruit by always giving out those sweet forum “Likes”)
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That sums up my experience with Moshfegh generally, but I see that in a positive light. I wonder what you would think of her other books like Death in her Hands or Lapvona, as they are less about depression/addiction and spiraling but still just as… bleak? I don’t know how to describe it but you do leave the book with a sign of relief by the end. Another thing I find interesting in those other works is that I found them to be more ironic and satirical, maybe because they were more blatant than in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. That’s my take on her as a lvl 1 Crook reader.
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Feel like you’re absolutely right, Eileen is the same way. Bleak girlfail stuff
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reminds me of that tragedy
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Oh definitely!
In general the Three Body VR scenes felt very much like comedy sketches. You can tell he had a blast writing those and I had one reading them. I couldn’t stop grinning stupidly when they went into detail about reconstructing a von neumann CPU with people waving flags because the idea is fun in theory but absolutely unpractical and then he lands on the punchline that the trisolarians basically communicate via fiber optics/at the speed of light which makes it somewhat more reasonable but still absolutely ridiculous.
One of my personal highlights of book three were the fairy tales. Not only were they well written in and of themselves but to me they had quite a monty python-esque vibe to them.
I have to say in general that he very often caught me by surprise with where he took the story. Whenever I thought “okay this is what the story will be about for the rest of the trilogy” he always managed to pull out the rug under my feet without it feeling absolutely random.
A very fun read. He must be a wild person to have a conversation with. Though I can only imagine that he lives inside his own head 99% of the time if those three books are any indication of the stuff he thinks about. As written above I’ll take a rest by reading something shorter. Maybe I’ll continue with the next of the earthsea books. But I’m definitely interested in trying more of his books. They also got me hyped about space and sci-fi in general again.
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anyone read philosopher du jour byung-chul han? i just read psychopolitics and found a lot to admire.
I found him to be a bit empty of any real insights. his books have catchy concepts and titles but he barely scratches the surface of any idea presented -for the sake of commercial appeal, I suppose. his observations could more effectively be communicated in like, a tweet, or a youtube video.
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makes sense why i liked it then
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Yup, this is definitely a huge part of what I found so fascinating about them. The first book wasn’t simple by any means but the story did feel pretty self contained. Nothing could have prepared me for the scale and contour of what came after.
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I kinda liked this about Doppelganger! I felt like the tangled writing functioned as a way of capturing our tangled times - it wouldn’t feel right to present all of the information super linearly.
As for Naomi Klein herself, I haven’t read any of her other work. I own The Shock Doctrine, so maybe in the near future. After reading Doppelganger I found a podcast where she was a guest to talk about the movie Don’t Look Up. I hit play and the first ~10 minutes are her saying things like “the media elites are giving this movie negative reviews because they are afraid of TRUTH” and “Adam McKay and David Sirota are brave artists and elite critics aren’t capable of understanding their message” (as if Don’t Look Up is subtle at all!!!). She also glommed onto this weird idea that the only people who disliked the movie are people who don’t believe in climate change. I did not like that movie at all and was super thrown by her bizarre defense of it. I couldn’t believe it was the same woman. She sounded like an Alex Jones impression grafted onto left-ish politics. I turned off the podcast
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the thing about tangled times is that they make tangled people. so many writers who used to be sharp have gone a bit weird in the last decade, as well as musicians, all kinds of people… anyway, there is a documentary version of Shock Doctrine, also written by her, which is pretty good iirc
I had to stop watching Don’t Look Up, I found it so extremely annoying, big Hillary Clinton Pokemon Go To The Polls energy
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