Ok, talk about The Three Body Problem is cropping up again, so:

If I got completely bodied by the Chinese cultural history and ended up lost inside the first few chapters, if I just push through, does it get better? Is it like other sci-fi where you're meant to be confused and then by the end you get what's going on, only this time it's real history/culture instead of confusing fake org charts and technobabble?

I bounced off that AND This Is How You Lose The Time War around the same time, albeit for different reasons, and felt bad. 😭

@glassbottommeg So, I absolutely loved the series, it really is some of the best big-brain hard sci-fi I've ever read. But it's a tough read and the second book has an awful translation, and I can't in good conscience recommend it because A) the author's truly stunning level of misogyny shows clearly though, and B), the author works for a tech company in china dedicated to making software to help track (read: eradicate) Uyghurs.

@charlesrandall oh

fucking ewww

@glassbottommeg Yeah. I mean, the best part of the book can be had by reading this wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
Dark forest hypothesis - Wikipedia

@glassbottommeg I mean, it is absolutely masterful storytelling in how it goes about revealing the truth of that hypothesis, and what the actual concrete meaning of it is. It also does the amazing Forever War thing where there are big time jumps for humanity, and it's interesting to see how that is extrapolated.

But if you go into it, know what you are getting into imo.