Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem - JSTOR Daily
Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem - JSTOR Daily
Viewing the genre as a means to spread modern knowledge, Chinese novelists have been writing science-fiction stories since at least 1902.
Sci-Fi is fantastic. Of course there have been authors in China imagining the future since forever.
The Three Body Problem was an interesting book, and the series as a whole explores the Dark Forest theory really well.
But Cixian Liu pushed some weird stuff when it comes to gender. In the books, the entire male gender becomes "feminized" due to prolonged peace time, and this apparently makes humanity in aggregate docile, to the point that they make the "mistake" of electing a woman into a position of power that she won't be able to handle. Because she's a woman. The book makes it very clear that what is needed, is a man, not that simply this one woman is the wrong person for the job.
The entire series ends on a man absolving this same woman of responsibility for dooming humanity, he literally mansplains to her how because she's a woman, it can't be her fault. She can't blame herself for being incapable of doing what a man could have.
Very good sci-fi. But the plot gets weird and uncomfortable.
Edit: typo, book instead of books, making it seem like I'm referring to plotlines in the first book, when I'm in fact referring to stuff in the second, and the trilogy in general.
wow... that book was published in 2008?
the stuff your describing... I'd expect in some off-beat 1950's scifi, or something.
Weird. (Not to say that we're perfect, but, yeah. the casual sexism in Asimov's was... jarring. I didn't remember from when I last read it... which to be fair was in middle school.)
Asimov's women characters still had the ingredients of people, and were allowed independent agency. They could present both problems and solutions in the plot, etc. Yes, at worst it could be bad, but he wrote women in plenty of different lights.
For the time, he often put women characters in fairly progressive roles, even.
Meanwhile, the only time Cixian Liu allows a woman character to make decisions, is when he needs something to go wrong for the plot.
Sci-fi carried that weird male superiority thing well into the late 80s, that's part of what put me off the entire genre when I was younger. It was incredibly difficult for women to break into the sci-fi boys club until the 90s or so, the shift happened around the same time as the x-files caught on.
I managed to get through the first book but it was embedded cultural mores like that that made it tough going for me. That’s probably a shortcoming in me more than any fault of the book—science fiction should take you to places that challenge you—but it wasn’t worth it for me personally.
The story explores some very intriguing concepts, (ftl travel, multi-dimensional space, dark forest theory, technological explosions, planck-tech, the list goes on) but I had the same problem. I listened to the audio book, so I had the benefit of mentally tuning in and out as the story waxed and waned.
The second book especially had something which really annoyed me. Mister main character has to save the world but he doesn't wanna so the government tells him he can have whatever he wants so he asks for the perfect woman.
And then they just give him that? Her entire character is just that she's perfect and loves him and apparently that's real, she's not pretending? The fuck? The story almost instantly jumps to them having children and I was reeling because holy fuck I have never seen a female character be so thinly presented and objectified. She's literally payment for main charachter man to do what the government wants.
Then when they need to control MC boy again, they do it by taking this girl away from him. She's literally treated like a "thing" that can be taken and given. Whose love can be switched on on demand, and whose free will/wishes automatically matches whatever the men around her/plot demands.
I can't remember any of that...
The first book has barely any of the weird stuff. It's a slow burn and by far my favorite. Did you read the full trilogy? The second book is where the plot goes off the deep end, and the third is bonkers.
I could get into specifics but I'd have too look up chapters and sentences to quote, charachter names etc.
And as I said, the exploration of actual sci-fi concepts is solid right up to the end.
I don't get the love for this series. It's awkward and hand-wavy.