Just polished off this 2012 novel by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, which Graham had gotten as a birthday present from his friend Tyler and which has been enough of a sensation that it has a cover blurb from Barack Obama himself. It had been a while since I had read any sci-fi, it's not my go-to genre for sure, so it was refreshing in many ways.
I may go on and read the next two volumes in his trilogy at some point, but for now I'll be taking a break. Though it is a very inventive book, it still has many of the pitfalls of mainland Chinese novels I've read in the last couple of years, though admittedly my sample size of two is rather narrow, so I should read more. First and foremost, the characters are rather wooden and thinly sketched. They just don't grow much as people. At best they are like action movie characters that could be played by Bruce Willis.
Liu also gets a little too caught up in technical detail of protons and sophons and blah blah blah. Of the last 40 pages, maybe half of it is caught up in "unfolding a proton in 11-dimensional space". Is some of what he's saying plausible from a sub-atomic physics perspective? Could be. I could probably spend a bunch of time reading about it to figure it out. But I really don't care. It's not a good way to bring a suspenseful novel to a close. It just pissed me off.
June 2019 New Yorker article about Liu. Makes me want to read more.
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