Just for you uncultured swine that don't know how especially bad this is, on top of giving the direction of a movie about China to 2 white dudes, the Three Body Problem has also been internationally awarded, like it's a fairly big deal. It was the first Asian novel to win the american Hugo (sci-fi books) awards.
They're going to absolutely butcher this poor book.
I just read that book, the footnotes are very sparse and brief. Unless there's multiple translations or something. Obviously, still bad that they put those guys in charge
It's interesting but not engaging, if that makes sense. I haven't read the sequels
I'm not super well read in sci fi, but I liked it. Reading the second one now. If you like an interesting story with not that interesting characters, check it out.
Wendy Jones is not your average MIT student; a brainy brunette with an understated sexiness, she is taking girl power to the next level as she majors in five theoretical physics subjects at once. However, the late 60's is no place for a girl who's not that into politics. Confrontations with bra-burners and student rioters force her to take an unpaid internship in a remote research station in Alaska. She just wants to
grillstudy, damn it! But not even there can she avoid Politics, and as she's lashing out at her hippie supervisor with a 53-page letter to the editor she gets recruited into the mysterious program called COCOLOCO. On the surface this seems to be your average project to assassinate Fidel Castro via a weather control array, but the truth is far weirder. Join Wendy as she navigates the man's world of radio telescopy and as she teachesREDACTEDabout neoliberal economics.MEANWHILE in NYC present day, Jack MacMiller is a former navy seal and chaos theory expert. He's divorced and has a drinking problem but in a sexy way, you know the type. From out of nowhere, his tinder keeps getting spooky messages in a creepy font. Like this: "you've got 48 hours. we're coming for you." Join Jack as he gets involved in a freaky underground society of other sexy badass nerds and an MMORPG that seems a little too creative to be fictional...???
It would be better tbh. They won't as they gotta get that anti communist propaganda in.
It's not super complex, like Greg Egan's work. But it's not very simple and it is very much idea rather than character driven, with approximately 1.5 exceptions.
I liked his Star Trek, the first one at least. It was what I want from a summer blockbuster movie. His Star Warses were ass, though. Rian Johnson did nothing wrong.
Yeah you're right that it wasn't "Star Trek" as we've come to know it before, it was much more of a popcorn blockbuster action movie, but one with a reasonable plot, good action, some thrills, spills, and chills that were all nicely balanced creating a very entertaining summer movie. As much as those movies are like cinematic fast food, actually getting a good one seems incredibly rare these days. The last entertaining Hollywood action movie I saw (that wasn't a comic book movie) was Mad Max and god dammit that was 5 years ago. I just want a fun spectacle that isn't insulting to my intelligence. It doesn't need to be smart, or even not stupid, just not insulting, like how the new Star Wars movies were insulting.
Hmm the Last Jedi was uneven but was actually trying something other than lowest common denominator so props.
This is the only reason why I give it any props. It was a terrible movie, but I could see Rian Johnson was essentially handed a wet sack of shit and told to make it into Michelangelo's David and then had constant interference from Bob Iger, apparently trying to make the movie more appetizing to Chinese audiences since the first installment of the new trilogy, which was apparently so forgettable that I don't remember its name, bombed at the Chinese box office because Star Wars doesn't have the cultural cache in China that it does in the west.
I liked what seemed to be Rian Johnson's idea for the movie, that the binary thinking of the jedi vs sith is what was causing all this chaos, not simply the existence of the sith, because they were always tied to the jedi. I saw the future he was building towards and thought the, "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." direction was great and I was excited to see where that was leading, until like 2 sentences later when Kylo Ren is like, "let's start with obliterating refugee ships" and that whole new direction got squashed and the rest of the movie was backtracking on everything it was building in the first half. So pointless and bad.
The Last Jedi was what we deserved. For the people who realized the new trilogy was a big budget Fyre Fest of a film, it was the hilarious trainwreck they had been hoping it would be, for the people who still believed this was all part of some grand plan they couldn't yet perceive, they realized they were basically tricked by marketing. I see that film as a great moment of cosmic justice for everyone involved, in a way.
If it's anything like Altered Carbon, it'll be cancelled in a season.
Hot take: I'm expecting whatever the book end to be very similar to the show, just will had more time for setup and feel less abrupt. I genuinely hope no one ever tries to adapt an unfinished book as the show went truly downhill once they were on their own.
Obviously D&D should never be allowed near anything remotely creative again but basically the only thing I know about it is the literal premise, which is a counterfactual. Is it trying to be hard science fiction or is it more like science fantasy? Cus if it's trying to be hard sci-fi that kinda kills my drive to read it.
It's trying to be hard Sci Fi. And the counterfactual (in the title) isn't, which is a key plot point. There are some orbital mechanics errors that shit me, but nothing that someone who didn't memorise binary star distances as a kid would pick up on. And those can kind of be waved away as an abstraction
For something so basic as Newtonian mechanics I'd say no. It's much easier to get away with if it's not already well established physics, though apparently it only seems counterfactual but idk
Genre's are mostly marketing categories tbh but yeah that'd probably get labeled as fantasy, maybe science-fantasy if it was really strict about the alchemy system but generally anything remotely medieval is autolabeled fantasy if it has any magic whatsoever.
People absolutely have different criteria for something being hard sci-fi though. It generally lacks things like FTL travel or antigravity and the plot is in some way dependent on the science i.e. you couldn't change the setting without drastically changing the plot. Poul Anderson's Tau Zero is a great example of this and alot of it is known now to be counterfactual but it's still held up as a great hard sci-fi book, the key is it played in the zone of plausibility when it came out.
If you want to get into it, a more recent one is, Blindsight by Peter Watts is one I'd recommend, despite some very cringey passing references to Richard Dawkins (and I think Elon Musk iirc) it's a good hard sci-fi book.
For speculative fiction you generally want to choose something that has a low chance of being disproven before you can publish it. In general such drastic inventions of new physics are not seen as hard science fiction except in the rare cases where the author is actually a physicist or something but then they usually aren't going to speculate too wildly when they are know they almost certainly are going to be wrong. Soft sci-fi or hard magic fantasy usually fills that niche, the books have better longevity that way.
Not to pick on your hypothetical but you could easily have all the same effects by just digging a bit into materials science and/or condensed matter physics, even if you just stuck to things that we know are possible but are currently too difficult to manufacture at scale (or at all) you'd have plenty of new unique materials to build a compelling story around.
