The Three-Body Problem

I learned about Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy only recently in the sci-fi book club that I help run at the BottleHouse in Cleveland.  To be honest, I didn't know anything about either this author or about Chinese sci-fi before picking up this book.  Although I have been trying to expand my boundaries in this genre, most of my readings still tend to be pretty American, if not pretty white and male.  That may be a topic I can return to later because I want to focus on this first.  Just today I finished The Dark Forest, the second novel in this series, translated into English.  The first book, The Three-Body Problem, begins in Soviet China during the cultural revolution.  The characters in the novel struggle with the oppressive political constraints placed on them from the Communist party while trying to develop their state technology and stay current with the west.  The scientist characters of the novel must constantly temper the direction of their progress to fit with the dominant political ideology.  This is a powerful observation because our conception of an objective science is so pervasive in the United States but we ignore the fact that it is deeply political and politicized, similarly to the way that it is presented in the novel.  While scientific developments in the west are rarely  overtly compared to the tenets of dialectical materialism or some other meta-narrative, scientific avenues are subject to political bias and are subject to falling into and out of mainstream fashion.  There is an illusion of science as a monolith separate from culture that a lot of good science fiction tries to dispel.
In the first novel, scientists in China are able to make contact with a civilization in a nearby solar system.  When the characters learn that the inhabitants of this planet intend on using their superior technology to block further scientific progress on Earth so that they can colonize it, the narrative turns into a mediation on the strategy to overcome the aliens.  This strategy is a part of a long game, though, as the people of Earth learn that it will take the Trisolarans (as they are called) 450 years to reach Earth.
The second novel opens at the close of the modern era at a time when secret strategists are about to hibernate to become "reinforcements" for future generations.  I was worried that this would devolve into a weird time travel narrative, but Liu maintains his focus and reawakens several main characters from the first novel to continue their missions.  They learn, however, that the people of Earth have made some great strides in their technology within the limits still available to them. They have grown confident in their ability to defeat the Trisolarans based on the speed of their ships and the size of the fleets that have been able to build.
While I admit that there are parts of this trilogy-so-far that seem a bit trite or predictable in the world of sci-fi the novels do offer some genuine surprises in their inventiveness.  The first-contact narrative does not go according to the old tropes and there are some interesting turns in the second novel.  It gets bleak at times, but this is part of the enjoyment.  As I mentioned at the top, I just finished the second novel in the trilogy, and I am completely uncertain where the final one will go.  These books have surprised me and they turn on the expected sci-fi tropes.

I used to live in an apartment building where I would find old pulp sci-fi books in the laundry room.  Many of these I would read and then return to the shelving in the basement, but I collected and kept a number of them when I moved out so that I could continue to read them.  I left behind a number of my own books to pay back the small library.  I read a number of novels that I enjoyed: Joe Haldeman's Forever War, a couple by Mack Reynolds (After Utopia and  Satellite City), Out of Time by James P. Hogan, and Level 9 by Mordecai Roshwald.  All of them are pulpy but have interesting ideas, and some are better written than others.  I read a few that I didn't care for -- Them   by Robert French topping the list --  and Philip Wylie's The End of the Dream was one of them.
The novel's concept is to present a collection of evidence from a future world that reflects poorly on the environmental policies of the current day.  The novel came out in 1972 and posits the year 1975 -- a long-past date in the present time of the novel -- as the point of no return for humanity before crisis.  There isn't much of a plot or any kind of character development.  Wylie tries to humanize it a bit by including two characters who head up a sort of futuristic conservation league, but the confines of the epistolary format keep them uninteresting and undeveloped.  They are only names at the bottom of blocks of text.
The novel is a sledge-hammer and it is worse for it.  I am all for sci-fi novels that use the future as a means of critiquing the present, I think sci-fi at its best always does this, but this is just too far.  There are burning rivers and plagues.  It might line up with biblical plagues of Egypt but I didn't end up caring enough to find the parallels.
The opening pages of the book contain blurbs about Wylie's greatness.  I know that all books have these, but I am curious about the author's other work.  He seems to have a good grasp of the science of the day and has some imagination.  One of the more vivid reports is the narrative of a fisherman who witnesses hyper-evolved salt water leeches that can travel onto land and attack humans and other land mammals.  This is actually one of the more developed scenes and characters in the novel and it makes me hope that Wylie can do this on a sustained level when on less of a mission than he was with this book.
Most of the book leads from the darkness of 1975 when things can no longer be fixed to some point in the 21st century that is the narrative present.  At that future point, things are looking up and the remainder of human society that has not been killed off in some horrific way have recreated civilization and want to move forward.  It all ends with some shocking news I can't quite recall and refuse to look up even though the book is within easy reach that all of their efforts were for nothing and the world is actually going to end again, probably for real this time.
This book was not really enjoyable and I glossed over large portions of it because they were the kind of faux-technical writing that is extremely boring and not at all informative.  The cover, I think, is more interesting than the book.

Beginning anew

I have tried to start this blog several times.  Initially, I had conceived it as a series about punk music and punk aesthetics.  I have always been interested in punk music and culture and it is something that I have also written about from an academic perspective.  But I found this to be too confining and so I thought that I would expand this to also be about movies and books.  Then, when I tried to write about these topics, I kept floundering.  I would begin posts or jot down ideas and never finish them.  I had tried to draft posts offline so that I could have some in reserve and "bank" them for upcoming release.  This, too, I found to be too confining.  

So here is my newest start.  I am going to write this and post it without fanfare: this is my shameless attempt to jump-start my writing process again.  This new start has no rules.  I don't want to have anything like a posting schedule to bind me or a broad subject to confine.  Put simply, this is a place where I will post what I want when I want.  I have the feeling that a broad subject matter will become evident, but that will be left to determine itself.