I really, really like The Three-Body Problem. I was on vacation with Ryan once, he was reading it, and I read a few pages and then – if memory serves – essentially held the book hostage until I completed it. I read very fast. But still! It was a criminal act. In my defense – and I’m not saying it is defensible – the book was very good. Imagine that you had been eating something delicious, and were excited to continue. And then I took the plate, unhinged my jaw, and slid the contents of the plate down into my gullet. Ryan remembers this theft, all of it, at 120 frames per second: each turn of the page nearly pornographic, an eternity of lust.
I read the second and third books also. I am that person. A comparable example: most people only really liked Annihilation, and did not read the rest of The Southern Reach Trilogy – that is to say, Authority and Acceptance. Or, they read those books and wish that they hadn’t. There’s a similar phenomenon with the next two books in The Three-Body Problem – The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. Many people felt like the translation of the second book here was lacking, done as it was by someone other than the original translator, who came back for the third one. I didn’t notice, really, because the ideas in it are so massive. I think about them all the time. The third book, as is often the case, is completely gonzo stuff that I read partly out of a sense of solemn duty and partly because it’s essentially like five or so separate books. I could pace myself. Hydrate. Endure.
The kinds of massive ideas I’m talking about are things like the Fermi Paradox and The Three-Body Problem itself, which I think may be a funny double entendre in this case. Not atypical of Big Sci-Fi, but grappled with by by Liu Cixin in a really unflinching way. I can see how a person might bounce off these books. They’re the material pontifications of an author with pokeymans he cannot wait to show you.
I started watching the Netflix adaptation of the book and had to pause it almost immediately. First hand accounts of Maoist struggle sessions and the environment of the Cultural Revolution broadly are things that I’m educated on, and the book has a clear opinion on what it leads to. But it’s so fucking insane that it puts a little self-replicating idea in my head. It’s like one of those videos where they put rocks in a washing machine, except it’s my skull. I have to be careful with it. I have to meter my exposure.
Today is the LAST DAY that the PAX East Show Store will be online, so all of my dark warnings are now come to fruition. Don’t forget Dabe’s book!
(CW)TB out.
