Nice review, I enjoyed it. I read the books a while ago and it was good to see I’m not alone in seeing it as deeply conservative. As far as that goes, I wondered how much of that is sort of general Chinese attitude vs. non-Chinese attitude, and how much if it is unique to the author.
One thing that keeps bothering me about the book is I can’t make sense of Wade.
Wade was the ideal swordholder, because he could stick to commitments. Is he supposed to be absolutely bound by them, though, and is that why he inexplicably obeys Cheng, because he agreed to in the past? That’s a coherent notion of character, but it hardly feels explicable; it makes sense if Wade is an AI, but not really as a human. Or at least that’s how I felt.
I think a lot of things is because it’s Chinese. Liu Cixin (LCX) writes in an essay about how he felt that aside from the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution was the only thing that could make people lose complete hope in humanity.
For the criticism Zvi brings up, the book is written by someone who is well-read and is familiar with history. For instance, the climatic battle wherein the massed human fleet is wiped out by a single Trisolarian attack craft? It’s been done before; Battle of Tumu in Ming history involved an inexperienced Emperor under the control of an utterly incompetent eunuch lead an army to fight the Mongols in the steppes and gets 200,000 soldiers killed within 2 weeks as they run out of food and water. There’s also a battle in the Chinese Warring States period wherein subterfuge by the enemy gets an incompetent commander put up, Zhao Kuo, who changes from a Fabian strategy to a direct attack strategy and gets 200,000 to 300,000 Zhao State soldiers wiped out by the Qin State, and unlike Rome after Cannae, Zhao never recovers.
For more non-Chinese examples, a close examination of Empire of Japan policy before World War II and during World War II betrays rampant incompetence and what really amounted to a headless chicken that didn’t know when to bide for time. Yamamato at the Battle of Midway charged in not knowing his codes were broken and utterly underestimating the Americans. Or we could point to World War I, called the First European Civil War by some leftist historians, severely weakening European civilization as a generation of young men were massacred in the trenches.
As for Wade, it’s the non-Western thing that comes to mind. When the Ming Dynasty fell, many former government officials sought not to eat grain grown in the succeeding Qing Dynasty, not because they felt their resistance would be successful, but because of a radical deontologism. What this resulted in was that once they ran through their stockpiles of food, they’d literally starve to death to protest, and I emphasize that this was a “meaningless” protest with no positive consequences, it did nothing to the new Qing Empire. You have to recall that people in the Confucian bloc, while often-times extreme consequentialists, are also insane deontologists, think General Nogi following his Emperor in death.
That is to say, I don’t find the Chinese characters flat, given how Chinese people behave. Wade is not a believable American, but he’s reasonable within a Chinese context.
Nice review, I enjoyed it. I read the books a while ago and it was good to see I’m not alone in seeing it as deeply conservative. As far as that goes, I wondered how much of that is sort of general Chinese attitude vs. non-Chinese attitude, and how much if it is unique to the author.
One thing that keeps bothering me about the book is I can’t make sense of Wade.
Wade was the ideal swordholder, because he could stick to commitments. Is he supposed to be absolutely bound by them, though, and is that why he inexplicably obeys Cheng, because he agreed to in the past? That’s a coherent notion of character, but it hardly feels explicable; it makes sense if Wade is an AI, but not really as a human. Or at least that’s how I felt.
I think a lot of things is because it’s Chinese. Liu Cixin (LCX) writes in an essay about how he felt that aside from the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution was the only thing that could make people lose complete hope in humanity.
For the criticism Zvi brings up, the book is written by someone who is well-read and is familiar with history. For instance, the climatic battle wherein the massed human fleet is wiped out by a single Trisolarian attack craft? It’s been done before; Battle of Tumu in Ming history involved an inexperienced Emperor under the control of an utterly incompetent eunuch lead an army to fight the Mongols in the steppes and gets 200,000 soldiers killed within 2 weeks as they run out of food and water. There’s also a battle in the Chinese Warring States period wherein subterfuge by the enemy gets an incompetent commander put up, Zhao Kuo, who changes from a Fabian strategy to a direct attack strategy and gets 200,000 to 300,000 Zhao State soldiers wiped out by the Qin State, and unlike Rome after Cannae, Zhao never recovers.
For more non-Chinese examples, a close examination of Empire of Japan policy before World War II and during World War II betrays rampant incompetence and what really amounted to a headless chicken that didn’t know when to bide for time. Yamamato at the Battle of Midway charged in not knowing his codes were broken and utterly underestimating the Americans. Or we could point to World War I, called the First European Civil War by some leftist historians, severely weakening European civilization as a generation of young men were massacred in the trenches.
As for Wade, it’s the non-Western thing that comes to mind. When the Ming Dynasty fell, many former government officials sought not to eat grain grown in the succeeding Qing Dynasty, not because they felt their resistance would be successful, but because of a radical deontologism. What this resulted in was that once they ran through their stockpiles of food, they’d literally starve to death to protest, and I emphasize that this was a “meaningless” protest with no positive consequences, it did nothing to the new Qing Empire. You have to recall that people in the Confucian bloc, while often-times extreme consequentialists, are also insane deontologists, think General Nogi following his Emperor in death.
That is to say, I don’t find the Chinese characters flat, given how Chinese people behave. Wade is not a believable American, but he’s reasonable within a Chinese context.