Three-Body Problem TV Series (By Tencent, CCTV) is going to release its first episode today! (2023/1/15)The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体; lit. 'Three-Body...
The anime has been very Not Great so far (I'm still gonna finish it) but this looks fantastic.
I tried listening to the audiobook. The opening was super depressing. Is it worth continuing? I almost cried at the scene where the based young girl with the red flag gets shot down…let alone the death of old professor who just wanted to teach his students science…
Is the book anti communist? Like, was the cultural revolution actually killing physics professors?
Imo the series is kind of like older sci-fi (I was reminded of some of Asimov's robot short stories) in that it lays out a premise and then examines different things that might happen as a result, but the plot itself is pretty weak (especially in the latter books). If you're into that style, then keep going, if not, you're not missing out on much.
Is the book anti-communist?
From my extremely limited perspective as an angloid, the Cultural Revolution seems to be generally regarded as A Bad Thing in China, so it's not a surprise it's treated as such. The author has defended the CPC in interviews before, but imo doesn't seem particularly interested in politics and so it isn't focused on. The latter books in particular have some weird stuff on gender roles but otherwise nothing stands out either way.
That sounds fair. I am also angloid, so I’ll trust that the criticism made by a person from China that is seemingly at least a comrade is valid. The opening scenes are just so brutal… I normally like hardcore stuff, and even I shied away from it.
How bad is the gender stuff? I don’t want to get invested and get blindsided by transphobia.
I don't think there was any transphobia, but it's been a while. More like "men logic woman emotion" bullshit.
spoiler
A man who is placed in an important position in society has the society's intelligence apparatus find his literal dreamgirl as payment for services. She goes along with it and is generally portrayed as very timid, to the point of ridiculousness.
A society where traditional masculinity has been eschewed to the point that men are nearly indistinguishable from women is depicted as weak.
A woman takes over an important role in society and things immediately collapse because she has too much empathy,
Side note: I was surprised that the word for logic in Chinese wasn't 論理／论理 like it is in Japanese and Korean, and apparently it's literally a phonetic loanword from English logic coined by a Chinese translator probably sometime in the mid-to-late 18th century. A lot of technical terms in the East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) are ultimately Japanese coinages from this period which have been seamlessly imported, and most of those are calques (following the meaning of the components of a word but not the sound) using Chinese characters, so it's interesting for me to see a word that's both not-Japanese and is phonetically rather than semantically formed. Also interesting that the Chinese (or at least, some influential translator) felt they needed to distinguish between Western logic and traditional Chinese notions of logic whereas the Japanese were content to stick with the Chinese word. Maybe the layer of abstraction (borrowing from Chinese) made the word feel less weighed down by history for the Japanese.
using loanwords is pretty common during the period of the ''venacularization'' of Chinese. In the first republic, a lot of intellectuals were anti-chinese culture because it is archaic, there were ideas of purging the Chinese writing system and go full romanization (kind of like in Vietnam) so i guess the whole loan words thing is a vestige of this (which is pretty common the in mainland, you can see that there were series of Chinese modernization especially in the simplification of characters that follows different rule compared to let's say the modernization done by ROC, Koreas or Japan)
The end of Death's End shows that Xin's/humanity's more empathic stance towards other civilizations becomes a sort of new normal. Like the Dark Forest is still kinda in effect, but the chain of suspicion is vastly reduced because civilizations are at least willing to communicate "safe"/non-location information with each other. The new universe is a far better place without the Luo Jis and the Thomas Wades (or the Singers*) of the old universe.
But, the naming thing did lead to that wonderful moment in Death's End where
Death's End, the passing of the sword
Luo Ji passes the sword and immediately gets arrested and there was that line that was like "humankind was not grateful to Luo Ji, they chose Cheng Xin" which in the Chinese apparently can also be read as "humankind did not appreciate logic, it chose to fulfill their hearts." which I think is some neat wordplay.
*I haven't read Redemption of Time you can't make me read Redemption of Time.
we don't talk about Redemption of Time
we don't talk about Redemption of Time
we don't talk about Redemption of Time
we don't talk about Redemption of Time
we don't talk about Redemption of Time
For me the whole serie reads a little bit like cold war paranoia which I believe is the whole point.
There was an article about wargaming and zero sum game theory during the cold war where they asked a bunch of technicians STEMS people to solve the problem nuclear menace. The conclusion of the study is that there is a need of Humanities backgrounds for subjects touching geopolitics and diplomacy
Ewwww, that sounds bad. Luckily my library has the books, but I’ll definitely pass on putting priority. …in further thought: as a Westoid I can’t criticize, because that’s still less fucked up than what we do on the reg…but still that’s pretty bad.
As a comrade, do you consider the books to be worth it? Like, I dipped out early because of the cultural revolution stuff. So I don’t know enough to have a valid opinion.
Yes, that is all true. I can’t help but judge that statement in light of my own education though. My education was deeply focused on religious education, and the amount of complete ignorance I see here and almost everywhere else regarding historical facts relating to that makes me deeply skeptical on the validity of lay-people being allowed to have opinions that are taken seriously on anything.
Like, I’m not an expert, therefore I’m. Kt allowed to have an opinion. Same way somebody who doesn’t speak Aramaic shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on the gospel
Point being: ignorance is a complete disqualification. And I’m ignorant on this.
Even ignoring any politics, I thought they were just okay. The writing style was awkward, which made me wonder if the translation I read was poor, and if so how much that hurt my enjoyment.
I thought they were pretty fun books. You get a little bit of mystery, an alien invasion story, people coming up with wacky plans to stop it, some wild shit at the end of the trilogy. There's some weird gender brainworms that don't actually impact the story very much, but the series moves past the cultural revolution pretty quickly. It mostly serves as a backstory for why Wenjie does what she does.
Read them if you like cool sci-fi stories and don't mind some cringe every now and then. Or just watch one of the three adaptations coming out.
Thanks for the response. Your other comment about the names was really interesting actually. Yes, gender brainworms bad, but as a non-speaker I always love it when people clue-in others regarding the wordplay. I have almost universally heard good things, but thats from reddit libs. It is nice to know comrades here also like it. Sometimes it feels like being gaslit when mainstream nerd culture praises bad stuff, so its nice to check in with people here on things.
I am intrigued by "wild shit". sounds like I need to give it another go.
The opening was super depressing. Is it worth continuing?
The book is interesting because it's less about character development but more about the world-building and the political aspect in a galaxy scale. If you don't like utilitarian literature, you can skip it.
in terms of how cringe Liu's work is, if you can take on Philip K dick, you can probably read Liu
Is the book anti communist?
Liu Cixin was sent into the countryside during Cultural Revolution and probably what is called the ''lost generation'' which describes a generation of people from more priviledged strata of the pre-cultural revolution that got their lives interrupted during the period or people who gained prominence during this same period who got purged later when the CPC stepped in and retook control.
As if Liu is anti-communist, i think the best you can describe him is a patriot with left sympathy. You can read other work he wrote where he laments a lot about the fall of the USSR and how people in the country lives in absolute misery. There was a short story where Russia reinstated Communism and NATO started a hot war in order to topple the Russian government again.
Cultural Revolution is not viewed as a very positive period. Ironically, when people talks about how '' the CCP killed 120948323049234 billions people'', they are not referring to the cultural revolution but the Great Leap Forward where there was mismanagement of economic development after the sino-soviet split. However, the decentralized administration of the Cultural Revolution and the senseless fightings, killings and lynchings left a more impact in the population's psyche.
Like, was the cultural revolution actually killing physics professors?
As mentioned before, the problem with the Cultural Revolution was the vagueness how it is conducted (the idea of what constitutes counter-revolutionary and what is the appropriate punishment is left for the populace to decide). A lot of what happened is mostly anecdotal and the government didn't really tried to record the damages done in more local level and since this period is what is consider the dark period of the CPC, you won't have any mentions or very vague mentions of it. The cities vs countryside impact of the revolution is also very different. The struggle sessions were more intense in the urban area, my mother's side was sent to the countryside where there were small events happened. On my father side who stayed in the city, there were lynchings in the most intense period.
As mentioned before, most of the things sometime makes no real sense, my maternal grandma is a pretty pro-party person got bullied non stop by someone for not taking position on who should succeed Mao (at the moment it was Hua Guofeng vs Liu Shaoqi). So we can say a lot of the struggle session is just an excuse (examples can be like: you speak russian/or is a russian, you said Mao is not as great as the Sun, you said the sun has spots on the surface, you made a pun, you made a vague historical reference to an event that is vaguely associated to the contemporary history, etc.) for people to take revenge on people they don't like. So if a student who don't like a certain teacher and if you can find momentum, you can probably drag them into a struggle session to be punish.
Thanks for this context. I just started the series as a fan of sci-fi and found the opening scenes of the book both profound and hard to read(in a wow that’s terrible sense).
I wanted some greater context that wasn’t going to be found on Reddit and I really appreciate you taking your time to type out these responses.
Like any forum, I think even here can succumb to echos and the description of the cultural revolution were honestly terrifying. Lessons should be learned from past actions, rather than repeated blindly. This forum should really put more effort and focus on thoughtful responses rather than quick reactions and shitposting.
I tried listening to the audiobook. The opening was super depressing. Is it worth continuing? I almost cried at the scene where the based young girl with the red flag gets shot down…let alone the death of old professor who just wanted to teach his students science…
Is the book anti communist? Like, was the cultural revolution actually killing physics professors?
Imo the series is kind of like older sci-fi (I was reminded of some of Asimov's robot short stories) in that it lays out a premise and then examines different things that might happen as a result, but the plot itself is pretty weak (especially in the latter books). If you're into that style, then keep going, if not, you're not missing out on much.
From my extremely limited perspective as an angloid, the Cultural Revolution seems to be generally regarded as A Bad Thing in China, so it's not a surprise it's treated as such. The author has defended the CPC in interviews before, but imo doesn't seem particularly interested in politics and so it isn't focused on. The latter books in particular have some weird stuff on gender roles but otherwise nothing stands out either way.
That sounds fair. I am also angloid, so I’ll trust that the criticism made by a person from China that is seemingly at least a comrade is valid. The opening scenes are just so brutal… I normally like hardcore stuff, and even I shied away from it.
How bad is the gender stuff? I don’t want to get invested and get blindsided by transphobia.
I don't think there was any transphobia, but it's been a while. More like "men logic woman emotion" bullshit.
spoiler
A man who is placed in an important position in society has the society's intelligence apparatus find his literal dreamgirl as payment for services. She goes along with it and is generally portrayed as very timid, to the point of ridiculousness.
A society where traditional masculinity has been eschewed to the point that men are nearly indistinguishable from women is depicted as weak.
A woman takes over an important role in society and things immediately collapse because she has too much empathy,
Main dude character: 罗辑，Luo Ji. His name is a pun of 逻辑, or "Logic".
Main lady character: 程心， Cheng Xin. A pun on 成心, "From the heart."
Yeah.
:bruh:
Destroyed by facts and Luo Ji.
Side note: I was surprised that the word for logic in Chinese wasn't 論理／论理 like it is in Japanese and Korean, and apparently it's literally a phonetic loanword from English logic coined by a Chinese translator probably sometime in the mid-to-late 18th century. A lot of technical terms in the East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) are ultimately Japanese coinages from this period which have been seamlessly imported, and most of those are calques (following the meaning of the components of a word but not the sound) using Chinese characters, so it's interesting for me to see a word that's both not-Japanese and is phonetically rather than semantically formed. Also interesting that the Chinese (or at least, some influential translator) felt they needed to distinguish between Western logic and traditional Chinese notions of logic whereas the Japanese were content to stick with the Chinese word. Maybe the layer of abstraction (borrowing from Chinese) made the word feel less weighed down by history for the Japanese.
deleted by creator
using loanwords is pretty common during the period of the ''venacularization'' of Chinese. In the first republic, a lot of intellectuals were anti-chinese culture because it is archaic, there were ideas of purging the Chinese writing system and go full romanization (kind of like in Vietnam) so i guess the whole loan words thing is a vestige of this (which is pretty common the in mainland, you can see that there were series of Chinese modernization especially in the simplification of characters that follows different rule compared to let's say the modernization done by ROC, Koreas or Japan)
yeah that part is kind of weird , but I don't think the serie is really going with the ''logic'' prevails in the end but that just me
I agree,
Death's End, Ending
The end of Death's End shows that Xin's/humanity's more empathic stance towards other civilizations becomes a sort of new normal. Like the Dark Forest is still kinda in effect, but the chain of suspicion is vastly reduced because civilizations are at least willing to communicate "safe"/non-location information with each other. The new universe is a far better place without the Luo Jis and the Thomas Wades (or the Singers*) of the old universe.
But, the naming thing did lead to that wonderful moment in Death's End where
Death's End, the passing of the sword
Luo Ji passes the sword and immediately gets arrested and there was that line that was like "humankind was not grateful to Luo Ji, they chose Cheng Xin" which in the Chinese apparently can also be read as "humankind did not appreciate logic, it chose to fulfill their hearts." which I think is some neat wordplay.
*I haven't read Redemption of Time you can't make me read Redemption of Time.
we don't talk about Redemption of Time we don't talk about Redemption of Time we don't talk about Redemption of Time we don't talk about Redemption of Time we don't talk about Redemption of Time
For me the whole serie reads a little bit like cold war paranoia which I believe is the whole point.
There was an article about wargaming and zero sum game theory during the cold war where they asked a bunch of technicians STEMS people to solve the problem nuclear menace. The conclusion of the study is that there is a need of Humanities backgrounds for subjects touching geopolitics and diplomacy
Ewwww, that sounds bad. Luckily my library has the books, but I’ll definitely pass on putting priority. …in further thought: as a Westoid I can’t criticize, because that’s still less fucked up than what we do on the reg…but still that’s pretty bad.
As a comrade, do you consider the books to be worth it? Like, I dipped out early because of the cultural revolution stuff. So I don’t know enough to have a valid opinion.
deleted by creator
Yes, that is all true. I can’t help but judge that statement in light of my own education though. My education was deeply focused on religious education, and the amount of complete ignorance I see here and almost everywhere else regarding historical facts relating to that makes me deeply skeptical on the validity of lay-people being allowed to have opinions that are taken seriously on anything.
Like, I’m not an expert, therefore I’m. Kt allowed to have an opinion. Same way somebody who doesn’t speak Aramaic shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on the gospel
Point being: ignorance is a complete disqualification. And I’m ignorant on this.
But the New Testament's in Greek?
The original is Aramaic. It varies between different gospels. But Aramaic is language some of the oldest known copies are in.
Even ignoring any politics, I thought they were just okay. The writing style was awkward, which made me wonder if the translation I read was poor, and if so how much that hurt my enjoyment.
I thought they were pretty fun books. You get a little bit of mystery, an alien invasion story, people coming up with wacky plans to stop it, some wild shit at the end of the trilogy. There's some weird gender brainworms that don't actually impact the story very much, but the series moves past the cultural revolution pretty quickly. It mostly serves as a backstory for why Wenjie does what she does.
Read them if you like cool sci-fi stories and don't mind some cringe every now and then. Or just watch one of the three adaptations coming out.
Thanks for the response. Your other comment about the names was really interesting actually. Yes, gender brainworms bad, but as a non-speaker I always love it when people clue-in others regarding the wordplay. I have almost universally heard good things, but thats from reddit libs. It is nice to know comrades here also like it. Sometimes it feels like being gaslit when mainstream nerd culture praises bad stuff, so its nice to check in with people here on things.
I am intrigued by "wild shit". sounds like I need to give it another go.
Thanks for the response.
The book is interesting because it's less about character development but more about the world-building and the political aspect in a galaxy scale. If you don't like utilitarian literature, you can skip it.
in terms of how cringe Liu's work is, if you can take on Philip K dick, you can probably read Liu
Liu Cixin was sent into the countryside during Cultural Revolution and probably what is called the ''lost generation'' which describes a generation of people from more priviledged strata of the pre-cultural revolution that got their lives interrupted during the period or people who gained prominence during this same period who got purged later when the CPC stepped in and retook control.
As if Liu is anti-communist, i think the best you can describe him is a patriot with left sympathy. You can read other work he wrote where he laments a lot about the fall of the USSR and how people in the country lives in absolute misery. There was a short story where Russia reinstated Communism and NATO started a hot war in order to topple the Russian government again.
Cultural Revolution is not viewed as a very positive period. Ironically, when people talks about how '' the CCP killed 120948323049234 billions people'', they are not referring to the cultural revolution but the Great Leap Forward where there was mismanagement of economic development after the sino-soviet split. However, the decentralized administration of the Cultural Revolution and the senseless fightings, killings and lynchings left a more impact in the population's psyche.
As mentioned before, the problem with the Cultural Revolution was the vagueness how it is conducted (the idea of what constitutes counter-revolutionary and what is the appropriate punishment is left for the populace to decide). A lot of what happened is mostly anecdotal and the government didn't really tried to record the damages done in more local level and since this period is what is consider the dark period of the CPC, you won't have any mentions or very vague mentions of it. The cities vs countryside impact of the revolution is also very different. The struggle sessions were more intense in the urban area, my mother's side was sent to the countryside where there were small events happened. On my father side who stayed in the city, there were lynchings in the most intense period.
As mentioned before, most of the things sometime makes no real sense, my maternal grandma is a pretty pro-party person got bullied non stop by someone for not taking position on who should succeed Mao (at the moment it was Hua Guofeng vs Liu Shaoqi). So we can say a lot of the struggle session is just an excuse (examples can be like: you speak russian/or is a russian, you said Mao is not as great as the Sun, you said the sun has spots on the surface, you made a pun, you made a vague historical reference to an event that is vaguely associated to the contemporary history, etc.) for people to take revenge on people they don't like. So if a student who don't like a certain teacher and if you can find momentum, you can probably drag them into a struggle session to be punish.
Thanks for this context. I just started the series as a fan of sci-fi and found the opening scenes of the book both profound and hard to read(in a wow that’s terrible sense).
I wanted some greater context that wasn’t going to be found on Reddit and I really appreciate you taking your time to type out these responses.
Like any forum, I think even here can succumb to echos and the description of the cultural revolution were honestly terrifying. Lessons should be learned from past actions, rather than repeated blindly. This forum should really put more effort and focus on thoughtful responses rather than quick reactions and shitposting.