Last night, I finally finished #HoldUpTheSky, a collection of #CixinLiu's short stories, after taking a break to read Lessons In Chemistry.
My general opinion on Liu remains the same. He's great at coming up with ideas, but crap at writing characters. There are times when he's clearly trying to write something beautiful or transcendent, but it just falls flat.
However, one thing he really gets is #CosmicHorror. Too many people think the genre is about giant monsters with lots of tentacles and awkward names; a few know that looking at the monsters makes you crazy.
But Liu groks that the point of cosmic horror is that there are things, forces, entities out there so vast that they pay no more heed to humans than humans pay to termites.
The Trisolarans in Remembrance Of Earth's Past (AKA The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest) are his best-known example.
But the low-temperature artist in The Ice Sculptor is an even better example, because as mighty as the Trisolarans are, their motivations are rather human-like. The artist, on the other hand, casually turns Earth's oceans into a planetary ring because it looks nice, and dismisses humans' objections to their own extinction is irrelevant and annoying.
#CloudOfPoems is another good story in the collection.
In short, an ultraädvanced, transcendent alien decides they can easily surpass Li Bai's poetry by turning most of the solar system into a massive quantum computer to store every possible combination of characters that conforms to the rules of classical Chinese poetry. They succeed, but can't find the good poems among the crap.
It's an interesting take on the ineffability of art and ubuntu, that kind of feels like an indictment of techbros.
This is also what made the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic so compelling for me. They really understood just how immense the gap between us and any aliens we might ever encounter would be, and the consequences of that gap are truly horrifying.
Nice review. I never took to the Three Body Problem / The Dark Forest books but you have me thinking maybe I should give the shorts a try.
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