”To be blunt, Egan is not a great author, and this book is mostly his excuse to elucidate some ideas in philosophy.”
You are being, if anything, too nice to Greg Egan’s writing here. I think 4⁄10 is extremely charitable.
But if you enjoyed the hard sci-fi elements you’ll probably also enjoy “Diaspora”. Even the errata for this book make for a fun read and show you the level of care Egan puts into trying to make the science realistic.
The Three Body Problem
The two other books in the series (particularly The Dark Forest) are very interesting and have a much wider scope which gives Liu a lot of space for world-building. There’s also a fair bit of commentary on societal cultural evolution which you might enjoy if you enjoyed the non-western perspective of the first book.
A fair warning about the readability of The Dark Forest. Liu’s editor somehow let him keep in some crushingly boring material.
Death’s End is extremely wide in scope and faster paced. But I think you might hate the more fantastical sci-fi elements.
For me the problem is that the good bits of the Three Body Problem were the Cultural Revolution, the dynamics of political pressure being put on the science base, the virtual world computer game, and the tough guy, conspiracy theory obsessed bejing taxi drive who is always smoking and wise-cracking.
I thought the last 1/3rd of the book was nonsense. The technologies premised to enable some of the things that happened earlier in the book also make the whole plan redundant, as those tools could be equally applied with much less effort and subtlety to just brute force an immediate victory. Somehow (by the way books work) I just don’t see the sequels going back to the good stuff that was used to set the scene, but instead charging on with the aliens.
The sequels obviously include a lot of stuff relating to aliens, but a big focus is on how human group react to the various dangerous scenarios they now face. Much of the books are concerned with how human culture evolves given the circumstances, with numerous multi-generational time-skips.
The two other books in the series (particularly The Dark Forest)
I found the series to be a slog until about halfway through The Dark Forest, when jura Yhb Wv ragrerq pelbfgnfvf naq jbxr hc gjb uhaqerq lrnef yngre. After that, the series ramped up, and I couldn’t stop reading.
Cool list, I’m going to start reading Ted Chiang.
Some thoughts
Permutation City
”To be blunt, Egan is not a great author, and this book is mostly his excuse to elucidate some ideas in philosophy.”
You are being, if anything, too nice to Greg Egan’s writing here. I think 4⁄10 is extremely charitable.
But if you enjoyed the hard sci-fi elements you’ll probably also enjoy “Diaspora”. Even the errata for this book make for a fun read and show you the level of care Egan puts into trying to make the science realistic.
The Three Body Problem
The two other books in the series (particularly The Dark Forest) are very interesting and have a much wider scope which gives Liu a lot of space for world-building. There’s also a fair bit of commentary on societal cultural evolution which you might enjoy if you enjoyed the non-western perspective of the first book.
A fair warning about the readability of The Dark Forest. Liu’s editor somehow let him keep in some crushingly boring material.
Death’s End is extremely wide in scope and faster paced. But I think you might hate the more fantastical sci-fi elements.
For me the problem is that the good bits of the Three Body Problem were the Cultural Revolution, the dynamics of political pressure being put on the science base, the virtual world computer game, and the tough guy, conspiracy theory obsessed bejing taxi drive who is always smoking and wise-cracking.
I thought the last 1/3rd of the book was nonsense. The technologies premised to enable some of the things that happened earlier in the book also make the whole plan redundant, as those tools could be equally applied with much less effort and subtlety to just brute force an immediate victory. Somehow (by the way books work) I just don’t see the sequels going back to the good stuff that was used to set the scene, but instead charging on with the aliens.
The sequels obviously include a lot of stuff relating to aliens, but a big focus is on how human group react to the various dangerous scenarios they now face. Much of the books are concerned with how human culture evolves given the circumstances, with numerous multi-generational time-skips.
I found the series to be a slog until about halfway through The Dark Forest, when jura Yhb Wv ragrerq pelbfgnfvf naq jbxr hc gjb uhaqerq lrnef yngre. After that, the series ramped up, and I couldn’t stop reading.
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! Maybe I’ll give The Three Body Problem another chance.
Updating to say that I just finished the short story “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang and it was absolutely exceptional!
I was immediately compelled to share it with some friends who are also into sci-fi.