I think part of the value of Three Body is how foreign and yet how viscerally plausible the sociology is (even if you think that it gets things wrong, it still feels like something that could happen). Though the series mostly takes place in the future, it begins in the real, historical Cultural Revolution. It seems to me as if the whole sociology of the book is an extrapolation from what happened during the Cultural Revolution – a situation that saw large groups of humans pushed to their breaking point, and yet displayed failure modes very different from what Westerners are accustomed to.
One scene that stands out to me in this regard is when a whole population is trying to flee, but there’s only one ship that has the technology needed to get away in time. When the people realize this, they all try to shoot the ship down. To me this seems very much a collectivist thing to me – someone from an individualist culture might focus on people wanting to escape on that ship themselves; but the people in Three Body just want to equalize things by pulling the outlier down with them. Relatedly, I think that the reason the series as a whole feels so focused on sociology is that it is entirely about groups of people and never really about individuals at all. (Sure there are individual characters, but they mostly just function as vehicles for the story and/or ways to explore morality.)
Overall I disagree with Robin Hanson that Liu ‘gets away with things’ just because he’s Chinese. I think a large part of the value of his books is that they’re entirely Chinese in their viewpoint. While I believe in human universals, I think Westerners generally underestimate how differently from them many Chinese people think. Chinese people and Westerners may react very differently to situations, and that might explain much of why the sociology feels so wrong to readers like Robin Hanson. In any case it’s certainly fascinating and you should read it.
I think part of the value of Three Body is how foreign and yet how viscerally plausible the sociology is (even if you think that it gets things wrong, it still feels like something that could happen). Though the series mostly takes place in the future, it begins in the real, historical Cultural Revolution. It seems to me as if the whole sociology of the book is an extrapolation from what happened during the Cultural Revolution – a situation that saw large groups of humans pushed to their breaking point, and yet displayed failure modes very different from what Westerners are accustomed to.
One scene that stands out to me in this regard is when a whole population is trying to flee, but there’s only one ship that has the technology needed to get away in time. When the people realize this, they all try to shoot the ship down. To me this seems very much a collectivist thing to me – someone from an individualist culture might focus on people wanting to escape on that ship themselves; but the people in Three Body just want to equalize things by pulling the outlier down with them. Relatedly, I think that the reason the series as a whole feels so focused on sociology is that it is entirely about groups of people and never really about individuals at all. (Sure there are individual characters, but they mostly just function as vehicles for the story and/or ways to explore morality.)
Overall I disagree with Robin Hanson that Liu ‘gets away with things’ just because he’s Chinese. I think a large part of the value of his books is that they’re entirely Chinese in their viewpoint. While I believe in human universals, I think Westerners generally underestimate how differently from them many Chinese people think. Chinese people and Westerners may react very differently to situations, and that might explain much of why the sociology feels so wrong to readers like Robin Hanson. In any case it’s certainly fascinating and you should read it.