iselima

In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughts

The main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.

As I was cross-checking Le Guin's short stories to make sure I had access to all of them, I realized I was missing "Selection" which is a story written during the period covered by The Wind's Twelve Quarters but not included in it. The going assumption seems to be that Le Guin left it out because she didn't like it, but the editor of the monthly sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories liked it enough to print it in the August 1964 issue. You can buy a copy of this issue for about five US dollars, which happens to almost exactly track inflation from its cover price of 50 cents. So... I bought one! And since I bothered to do that, I figured I'd read the whole thing and report my findings.

( Notes on the issue and what's in it )

My comments on the stories contain spoilers.

"The HoneyEarthers" by Robert F. Young

A scuzzy rich space dude tries to horn in on his son's young wife... or does he??

Said rich space dude is Aaron Price, who owns a company that harvests water from Saturn's rings. His spoiled son Ronny leaves his wife Fleurette, and Aaron tries to manipulate him into not going through with the divorce by threatening to turn him in for tax evasion. Ronny flees the planet, and Aaron, who's been lusting after Fleurette for years, takes her to a romantic resort on the moon, where he finally reveals the truth: He is a time traveler, and Ronny isn't his son, but his younger self with "space fugue" amnesia brought on by a traumatic incident where he almost died working on the Saturn water-harvesting project. We don't get a super clear picture of Fleurette's reaction to this, but she basically runs like hell, which is the only part of the story that makes any sense.

I disliked this novelette so much it was hard to get through it. The SF elements are boringly infodumpy, the time travel plot is unnecessarily complicated and confusing (my synopsis simplifies it a LOT), the interpersonal drama plays like a bad soap opera, and the prose is so painfully overwrought and filled with clumsy metaphors that I occasionally wondered if it was satire. "The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves." (This character is human, so I don't believe he meant her cheeks were green, though I don't know what he did mean.) I guess we're supposed to think Aaron's behavior towards Fleurette is okay in the end because it turns out he is secretly her husband, but for most of the story we see him as her father-in-law, so he comes off like a disgusting creep. The way the author chooses to constantly emphasize how young and girlish and naive Fleurette is made my skin crawl. I had never heard of this author before, and at the end of this story I was relieved to depart from his presence.

"Selection" by Ursula K. Le Guin

On a colony planet where a supercomputer matches everyone to their genetically and socially optimal spouse, a woman is displeased with her match.

Joan doesn't have any specific reason to dislike Harry, she just finds him annoying and is pretty pissed to be stuck with him, though he likes her well enough. One day they're out skiing and Harry gets in an accident and breaks his leg. Seeing him vulnerable changes Joan's perspective on him and they end up happy together after all. The punchline: We go back to the guy who runs the matchmaking program, and find out that the supercomputer is far too busy with mission-critical processes to actually match the colonists up, so when nobody's looking he just draws names out of a hat.

This story was amusing but pretty slight. I saw the ending coming a mile away since there wasn't really anywhere else it could go, at least not for a writer who obviously isn't going to come out in favor of eugenicist arranged marriages. The execution could be better, but the idea that there are no predestined perfect matches and that relationships are what you make of them is a sensible one that I broadly agree with. I don't see any obvious reason why Le Guin wanted to bury this story; the prose is a little rough (by her standards, mind you, not by the standards of, say, Robert F. Young) but I don't think the story is significantly worse than the weaker entries in The Wind's Twelve Quarters. But as a writer I do understand that sometimes you look back at particular pieces and cringe for reasons that may not make sense to anyone else.

"Valedictory" by Phyllis Gotlieb

A trainee in a time travel project visits herself as a child.

Her childhood was hard, but she doesn't say how, nor does she have a clear picture of what she hopes to accomplish. She imagines she might tell her younger self to hang on, that things will get better. But when she sees herself at recess, singing and playing in spite of everything, she realizes how deeply she'd underestimated her own resilience, and returns to her present without saying anything to herself at all.

This story hit me like a truck and left me in tears. You don't need to know exactly what the protagonist's struggles have been, because the author taps into a universal truth for those of us who went through a lot of shit when we were younger—no matter what happened, we survived it and we're still here. The prose is clear and evocative, and a light touch is used with the speculative premise so it doesn't overwhelm the character work.

This was by far the best story in the issue and I'd be interested to read more by the author. Has anyone read her stuff?

Essay: "Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman" by Sam Moskowitz

Moskowitz profiles the editor of Superman and related comics.

This pretty extensive biography details how Weisinger got his start in science fiction, writing stories and editing fan and pro zines, before becoming instrumental in the growth of the superhero genre. I'm not a comics person so this wasn't of strong interest to me, but in the pre-Wikipedia age I'm sure it was nice to have a well-researched piece on an important figure from the fandom.

I did enjoy the recounting of the time in 1933 when Weisinger's mentor and co-editor Allen Glasser sold a story to Amazing that turned out to be plagiarized, causing the magazine's then-editor to freak out and refuse to work with anyone associated with Glasser. In turn this led Weisinger to shun Glasser and start his own zine with blackjack and hookers other friends. The drama! (I also liked Moskowitz's description of Glasser as "a slightly older scientifictioneer." There's a word we should bring back.)

"Furnace of the Blue Flame" by Robert Rohrer

In a post-apocalyptic future, a hero battles a dictator who controls the people by suppressing knowledge.

The dictator claims to use magic, but the hero recognizes his powers as forgotten technology—the titular Furnace is a nuclear reactor which he uses to torture dissidents with radiation poisoning. The hero leverages forbidden scientific knowledge to sabotage it and break his control.

This was well-written, well-paced, and it held my attention. I appreciated that it didn't dance around pretending to be fantasy for longer than necessary. I thought it was interesting that the villain's stated motivation is to prevent a reignition of the wars that devastated civilization. He thinks if he can just terrify everyone into absolute obedience, war will never come again. I also thought it was smart to have the hero fully understand the risks of bringing technology back, believing that power must come with an ideology of mercy. The old fashioned sword-and-sorcery style of storytelling with a noble manly hero is played very straight, and that left me cold, but I'd say the piece is successful on its own terms even though it's not really to my taste.

"Zelerinda" by Gordon Walters

Two men, one with psychic powers, search for alien life on a planet with a weather system of liquid metal instead of water.

It's hard to write a synopsis of this novelette because nothing happens in it. Various plot elements are introduced and none of them go anywhere. The psychic guy is afraid of being found out and locked away in a psionics research lab, but that never happens and his abilities have no impact on the mission. His brother was investigating the planet before them and disappeared, but they never find him, dead or alive. They think they find a structure, but it's just a cave. They come up with different theories about how life could exist on this world, but they're all wrong. There are no aliens, it's just a dead world with weird weather. The end.

This story is so long and so pointless that when it ended I felt actively angry that my time had been wasted on it. It takes ages for them just to get to the planet—why did we need all those scenes of the psychic guy being woken up to come to an emergency meeting and their boss waffling on forever??—and when they get there the search for life is full of unnecessary detail and repetition. The writing style also grated on me, especially the overly verbose and self-consciously "clever" dialogue. All the characters sound the same (just like the narrative voice, in fact) and have no development or real conflicts. You could write "liquid metal weather" on a post-it and get as much out of it as I got from this story.

Review column: "The Spectroscope" by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg reviews Starswarm by Brian Aldiss, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ninth Series ed. Robert P. Mills, and Escape on Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Starswarm takes previously published stories and retcons them into a connected narrative with some edits and linking commentaries. Silverberg finds this project "misguided and lamentable" and the commentary "sententious and ponderously coy" but he likes a few of the stories as stand-alones.

He gives a glowing review to the Fantasy and Science Fiction anthology, naming "Flowers for Algernon" first among the standout entries and calling the book "a must for a science fiction library."

Silverberg had apparently panned Burroughs' other works as "unmitigated trash" and "subliterate claptrap," so it is with some sheepishness that he admits to liking Escape on Venus for its more lighthearted comic tone. "Mitigated trash and literate claptrap, I suppose—but fun to read."