The Good
Western readers will inevitably learn a lot about the Cultural Revolution period and the attitudes about it people are comfortable expressing in print today. During this interview and in his postscript to the American edition, Liu distances himself from any reading of his work as cultural critique, maybe a bit too strenuously. Whether he should be credited as pointing us to a Straussian reading or this is just pragmatic avoidance of political attention is not clear to me.
Related to this, Western readers in particular are keen to find parallels between Trisolaris and Earth to China and America. Again Liu himself states this isn't what he's doing, and in any event it's not clear which planet would stand for which country. Trisolaris goes through cycles of death and rebirth not unlike China's dynasties (in fact, in the in-novel video game, represented literally as China's dynasties) and Ye is even explicitly described at one point as emerging from the chaotic winter of the Cultural Revolution. The regimented, autocratic aliens of Trisolaris are coming to dominate the naive Earth - the easy-going, beautiful Earth that fluorished in ignorance, as a Chinese author might imagine America. But this doesn't really fit. For one thing, Liu certainly doesn't come across as having any romantic fantasies about America; and Trisolaran sabotage of Earth's rapid advance also smacks of Chinese resentment at perceived Western interference in its rise. If two opposing narratives can fit so well, then I think we're probably crowbarring them into a story where they don't belong. Then again, a symbolic scheme need not be entirely consistent. Case in point, in District 9, are the aliens Soweto residents, or clueless interlopers like the Afrikaaners? Likely both, at various points.
The single best feature of this novel is its explosion of this idea that any technologically advanced civilization must necessarily be a moral one; that humans are inherently and uniquely bad; and that therefore, contact with starfaring aliens can only improve our lot. (This idea of humans being uniquely evil is actually grossly anthropocentric, morally pre-Copernican, invariably casting the rest of humanity as evil, except of course for the enlightened individuals lecturing the rest of us. It smacks of teenagers claiming to be Satanists. Why not just reject Christian symbolism entirely? Because that doesn't make your parents as mad.) Things did not work out well for the natives of the New World, and that was contact between the same species. And Cortez and Pizarro were surely more technologically advanced than the Aztecs and Incas, so why were they not also morally superior? Hence the moment when the police officer almost can't wait to show Ye the content of the messages they found on the Adventists' secret ship and destroy her "beautiful fantasies." It's worth pointing out that almost every cosmologist or astronomer who has a position regarding sending messages to other stars says that if the space-phone rings, we should not answer. And yet in the real world, many such attempts to advertise our presence have already been made, on at least one occasion frivolously as an art project.
The constant frustrated attempts to understand Trisolaran seasons raises a genuinely frightening implication of the problem of induction as it relates to life on Earth. Once the Age of Enlightenment arrived, the idea that we did not understand our world (or could not understand it) in some very relevant way became terrifying. Early strange fiction like Hodgson began to explore this horror of the irrational, of a universe which at its base could not be understood. Philosophically speaking, there are two categories of incomprehensible universes:
- Type 1: We don't understand the universe merely because we have not had the chance to observe a full cycle or the full domain, but ultimately, the universe is still lawful. Asimov's Nightfall is an example.
- Type 2: We don't understand the universe because we cannot. The universe is fundamentally irrational, or at least unknowable to narrow human intellects. Lovecraft's Cthulhu novels are an example; also, frequently, Dying Earth stories.
Ye is the tragic character, obviously, and she is the best-drawn. This woman suffers so much trauma, but the worst is that she realizes possibly the worst thing that anyone has ever done in history is her own action - she sacrificed her husband and accepted the loss of her daughter, then found that what she thought was the one meaningful achievement of her life, turned out to likely to mean the end of the entire human race at the hands of equally immoral beings.
The frustrations introduced by the sophon particle is reminiscent of the Sisyphean problems plaguing CERN and keeping it from finding the Higgs boson (which we know eventually was found.) But it's worth pointing out that in 2009 there was an apparently serious proposal that time travelers (or the Higgs boson itself) were interfering from the future with CERN to prevent some catastrophe that the Higgs boson, if created, would foment. Alas, we still exist.
I usually enjoy unexpected pacing and structure if I'm being surprised rather than bored or confused, and in this case, I was more often surprised. For one thing, this is a two-protagonist novel (Ye and Wang.)
The Bad
You will note the novel shares a number of the following weaknesses with the genre in general. First is characterization. Outside Ye and to some extent Shi, we barely know who these people are. In Wang's case, we only find out he has a family when he goes home, then he doesn't think about them again, even as he travels around the world, or in the face of mortal danger to himself, or even a threat to the entire human race. He finds out that we're dealing with aliens, and he barely reacts at all. Even a Dan Brown protagonist at least wanders around a novel imbuing the revelations with a sense of wonder and profundity. Wang isn't even a mouthpiece for ideas.
Liu offers very few sensory descriptions of anything, except the village outside Red Coast. Ye's experiences there are described in conspicuous sensory terms that stand out. It should not be a surprise then that Liu grew up in a poor rural village.
For any reader familiar with near-Earth stars, it wasn't a surprise that Trisolaris turned out to be Alpha Centauri.
If we're applying hard science fiction rules, then it's too great a coincidence that the aliens are within a few millennia of our own technological level. Aliens are much more likely to be either trilobites, or "phyla beyond [human] knowing" to use Benford's term, than something at all cognitively similar to humans that comes here on metal ships. This is a point that many readers of science fiction will not mind, but will bother anyone familiar with current academic thinking regarding the Fermi paradox. The fact that they even feel the need to insult us - "YOU ARE BUGS" projected on our retinas - makes them seem a bit too human-like. In fact the entire description of the "real" internal behavior of the Trisolarans is far too anthropomoprhic. There was some mention of the "living computer" having been a real thing there, and their movements being much faster than humans', so I hope I'm missing some slight of hand like the one Vinge used in Deepness in the Sky (the spider-aliens were in fact much more alien than they were portrayed earlier, with some internal narrative-style sleight of hand justifying this.)
Plot problem - if the goal is to disable scientists, then the sophons could do a lot better than create a spooky countdown in someone's visual field. You could blind them, or cause them to hallucinate. In the real world, hallucinations and even tinnitus alone can effectively disable people. Sensory disruption is much more effective than some higher order cognitive interference introduced by undermining ideas in a lawful universe. Furthermore this suggests a shockingly detailed knowledge of human psychology on the Trisolarans' part.
In the end I did not find that there were really new ideas developed in the novel; what looked like it would be an interesting exploration of the problem of induction or the rational nature of reality (see above) turned out to be industrial sabotage done by aliens instead of human enemies. The use of entangled programmed fundamental particles is interesting but so far beyond anything we think might be real that it's effectively fantasy. China Mieville has advanced the idea that the authorial voice of science fiction is one of radical authority - effectively, "here is how reality itself works. Accept it as possible in order to continue reading." (You might argue that limiting the ideas to known physics either elevates hard sf to the "correct" genre, and/or that it can only produce fictional worlds of straight line extrapolation that people in the future will regard as the early twenty-first century's answer to steampunk. But science and actual speculations thereon rather than just word play is what we know is real, and sticking to the rules of the real world is what keeps a story from being fantasy. This is why Star Wars is a a fantasy movie, masquerading as science fiction by giving its wizards and barbarians spaceships.)
A wild idea couched in the language of science even if the work is really fantasy, or even comedy (see: infinite improbability drives) can still be a good vehicle for thought, but unless you're showing us how to actually in real life unfold and program a proton, you don't need to devote so much space to it. This isn't a screed against exposition, which I think is unfairly devalued in science fiction. If you're introducing a new idea, you either have to stop and unpack it, either in the characters' voices, or through direct description. But the sophon programming section is unnecessarily long and actually became quite boring, the science fiction version of John Galt's sixty page monologue, and had nothing to do with actual science. Maybe this is a tendency of modern Asian fiction - Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland has a curiously long-winded description of skull-tapping and at the time I gave the author credit for doing something that I just wasn't getting, but I'm much less sure this is the case in a less literary novel.
I have a personal distaste for fantasy worlds inside science fiction novels. Spacetime folds that take characters back to their childhoods, neural interfaces that make their subconscious a real place, or in this case, a VR video game. It removes constraints from what the writer wants to do and becomes literary expressionism, which in novels (particularly those low on sensory description) seems watery and uncompelling.
In the end, after the hype, I was a bit disappointed. I'm glad I read it but the novel's strengths were really its different setting on Earth and historical perspective of the author. If this were an American science fiction novel it would be clearly mediocre.
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