(no subject)

[karanguni]

Nice hike today, and while I was out there I had a couple of thoughts about why I liked Three Body Problem beyond "cool words." All my own opinion, 'course.

• Without having read past just this book, the whole lynchpin of "how did that all happen?" relies on an account from an extreme unreliable source via a relatively unreliable narrator. Which is interesting the more I think about it, because all the science we ever read in this science-heavy book could be complete bogus junk and it doesn't really matter at this point.


• More on that: extrapenguin rightly pointed out that it's really a four body problem/three body + observer effects problem, but the most we hear about someone trying to solve that comes from... someone who has no idea about Trisolaris or desire to solve anything but a more classical version of the problem to begin with. Huh!


• While I'm not going to be writing home about any of the characters, I oddly did like how they were more vehicles for plot or some conceptual point than personalities. That Ye is communist alienation embodified; that Evans is so hilariously stereotypically a deus ex machina; that we get the whole contact as symbol idea waved in our face right early on. Which is odd for me; I normally read because I like one person and only endure the Concepts.


• I think that's also how I ended up reading the book: contact as symbol. It didn't matter what their science was any more than what ours was capable of. Instead we got a look into lopsided scientific development due to huge sociohistorical factors; political infighting; a strangely to-the-point answer to the very general "what if we met aliens?" question.


• The flatness of someone like Ye made... just a lot of sense to me. You do end up a hollow shell of a human being when that much shit has happened to you; when – as the three Red Guards said – you end up as an artefact of history more than something of your own agency. That hit home. That really hit home; that a character like isn't likeable – and why should she be?


• Thought re: suspension of disbelief: it's easier, for me at least, to believe that which is so far beyond what's possible (FTL travel!) than something that extrapolates off of near-future possibilities. However right or wrong the science in this, it was refreshing to read something near future; and I think it's difficult and brave to write in it, too.