"The thin curve [when Ye was watching a waveform
on a screen supposedly from an alien civilization], rising and falling, seemed
to possess a soul."
Metaphor only takes me so far...When I’m
reading a supposedly hard SF book I must put into action my non-suspension-of-disbelief-hat.
That’s the only way I can read this kind of SF. I’ve heard from some friends of
mine, that some books are all metaphor when the physics part of them are utter
crap…. Excuse me? It's like saying, "look here, this is my universe, but
try not to concentrate too much on it, look at all the beautiful metaphors I
wrote instead." Don’t tell me this is me being pedantic. One thing is
getting the physics right from scratch, the other thing is to do the
extrapolation stuff the “right” way. In this case, base physics is quite off
base, i.e., dead wrong in several key areas
of the book. They’re so wrong that I only finished it because I wanted to
pin-point the rest of the so-called errors. I know, I’m mean…The above-mentioned example is one of the most
glaring examples. A wave form where one’s able to see something behind it just
by looking at it! Even with poetical license in play, this is quite a bit of a
stretch. I could mention another examples, but this one is one of the most
obvious examples in showing that Cixin’s storytelling leaves a lot to be
desired.
Show-not-tell is quite absent throughout the book as any good SF vintage
book would. Unfortunately, this book was originally published in 2008. So we’re
neither in the 30, 40 nor the 50s…It’s my firm believe that because this work
was translated from “China's best SF author” by one of the well-read and
writers of SF nowadays (Ken Liu) there may be a propensity to interpret poor
form as some sort of interesting (aka exotic) nuance. If this book had been
self-published on Amazon it wouldn't be getting any attention at all. Instead
it’d be getting a lot of stick!
I'm usually not willing to roll with a
lot of nonsense when it comes to a Hard SF book, and in this case, because
getting the science right is at the core of it, I cannot read past the crappy
science.
When I was actively reading SF as if
there was no tomorrow, I’d be quite surprised to have been told that a book
like this would’ve won an Hugo Award, but in this day and age this book did
really win the 2015 Hugo Award! “Ancillary
Justice” by Ann Leckie is another good example of crappy SF
having won a Hugo Award the previous year, 2014. What’s happening to SF Fandom?
Is everyone going bonkers??? A book with this kind of info-dumping to explain the
key points of the plot and it wins a Hugo Award? It reads like tenth-rate
Stephenson. On top of that, the characters were so incredibly flat that by the
end of it I couldn’t remember any of them. Everything is so damn flat that at
times I kept saying to myself: “My God,
why do I keep on reading this kind of crap?” Alas, one is always on the
look-out to be proven wrong. It didn’t happen once again unfortunately. I’m
quite sure we won’t see the likes of Le Guin's “The Dispossessed”, Susanna
Clarke's “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”, Frederik Pohl's “Gateway”, to
name just a few, in the next few years on the Hugo ballot.
2 stars only for allowing me to
understand certain popular school of thoughts in China. Null stars for the rest
of the book. Average: 2 stars.
NB: The Hugos’ output in this day and
age 100% suck. The books are so fucking simple-minded. Worse than that, they're
all simple-minded in the same way, so I’m unable to distinguish those meant for
grown-ups from those meant for 10-year-olds...
SF = Speculative Fiction.
