Thank you for a sober and much-needed review. I read the books last year looking for the same things, and came up with similar takeaways. I was awestruck by the story’s scope and weird ideas, and even though 1) you could see everything hinged on strawmanning (American?) liberalism, 2) the grand game theory games were oversold, and 3) the character work is shoddy and full of backwards gender stuff. I was more than happy to read it as, as someone else pointed out, a mega-scale meditation on Moloch, even though by the end it has stooped to literally sighing a fatherly “you have too rosy a view of things” at us. I think that, despite the happy(-ish) ending and the hard sci-fi, Mr. Liu reveals himself to be a kind of modern Lovecraftian, one who acutely describes a universe that’s at best indifferent and often wants to kill you, though even better in the sense that all we have for Great Old Ones are each other. His pessimism does not reach Landian dead-ends, however, as the ending shows. It’s good to know, in the end, that there is a light of mutually assisted survival even at the end of ten-million-year-long and perhaps essentially Chinese tunnels.
I wouldn’t call Liu Cixin (LCX) a Lovecraftian. Take the New Yorker interview.
″ I believe science and technology can bring us a bright future, but the journey to achieve it will be filled with difficulties and exact a price from us. Some of these obstacles and costs will be quite terrible, but in the end we will land on the sunlit further shore. Let me quote the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo from the beginning of the last century, who, after a trip to the Soviet Union, said, ‘Over there, they believe in the existence of Heaven, but there is a sea of blood that lies between Heaven and Hell, and they’ve decided to cross the sea.’ ”
Liu Cixin’s worldview is closer to Camus, i.e, the world is the Absurd, something intrinsically inimical to us; the laws of thermodynamics apply and evolution has created sentient organisms that are capable of suffering. And like Camus, while he’s pessimistic on the state of the world and our odds of changing it, he sees something noble in our struggle against it. It’s not going to be Disney or Hollywood, insofar as the hero or heroine achieves their goals and gains without much losses; in “The Village Schoolteacher”, for instance, the defense technology of the invaders is overwhelmed by large-scale suicide attacks.
Thank you for a sober and much-needed review. I read the books last year looking for the same things, and came up with similar takeaways. I was awestruck by the story’s scope and weird ideas, and even though 1) you could see everything hinged on strawmanning (American?) liberalism, 2) the grand game theory games were oversold, and 3) the character work is shoddy and full of backwards gender stuff. I was more than happy to read it as, as someone else pointed out, a mega-scale meditation on Moloch, even though by the end it has stooped to literally sighing a fatherly “you have too rosy a view of things” at us. I think that, despite the happy(-ish) ending and the hard sci-fi, Mr. Liu reveals himself to be a kind of modern Lovecraftian, one who acutely describes a universe that’s at best indifferent and often wants to kill you, though even better in the sense that all we have for Great Old Ones are each other. His pessimism does not reach Landian dead-ends, however, as the ending shows. It’s good to know, in the end, that there is a light of mutually assisted survival even at the end of ten-million-year-long and perhaps essentially Chinese tunnels.
I wouldn’t call Liu Cixin (LCX) a Lovecraftian. Take the New Yorker interview.
″ I believe science and technology can bring us a bright future, but the journey to achieve it will be filled with difficulties and exact a price from us. Some of these obstacles and costs will be quite terrible, but in the end we will land on the sunlit further shore. Let me quote the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo from the beginning of the last century, who, after a trip to the Soviet Union, said, ‘Over there, they believe in the existence of Heaven, but there is a sea of blood that lies between Heaven and Hell, and they’ve decided to cross the sea.’ ”
Liu Cixin’s worldview is closer to Camus, i.e, the world is the Absurd, something intrinsically inimical to us; the laws of thermodynamics apply and evolution has created sentient organisms that are capable of suffering. And like Camus, while he’s pessimistic on the state of the world and our odds of changing it, he sees something noble in our struggle against it. It’s not going to be Disney or Hollywood, insofar as the hero or heroine achieves their goals and gains without much losses; in “The Village Schoolteacher”, for instance, the defense technology of the invaders is overwhelmed by large-scale suicide attacks.