It has been a while since I’ve written any book reviews. It used to be one of my favorite pastimes. These days I still read too much, but my writing has more specific purpose. I guess I don’t mind being alone in my reading, whereas being alone in my writing is a horrible prospect. I might as well just be doing crosswords.
Nevertheless, Cixin Liu has proven to be one of the most significant authors I’ve ever come across. I say this literally with the likes of Thomas Pynchon in mind. In his epic trilogy with The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death’s End, Liu has no rivals. He is like a combination of Cormac McCarthy, John McPhee and Neal Stephenson. Obviously the people of Netflix have figured that out and given us a stellar miniseries. Having read almost all of his work, I have gone back for a second drink, and I’m almost done pulling myself out of its compound mysteries and misery.
Liu jolted my senses like no other science fiction writer in 2018 with The Dark Forest. Then I wrote:
Liu has, with some very short logic whose parsing I will leave to the realm of suspension of disbelief, put a cap on all of the possible adventures of hard science fiction. In the end, it is about how we deal with ourselves. So with that said, the realm of science fiction ultimately resolves to how human we remain augmented by our own inventions and reinventions. The only remaining good thing about it is that its scope remains the fate of humanity.
Now having read so much science fiction and fantasy over the past decade, I may be running out of space for its philosophical import. That is because the irony of the remaining good thing is that no one should be responsible for such a great vision. Liu understands this which is why his invention of the Wallfacers is one of the most brilliant turns in the genre. Better than Asimov's Foundation geniuses. There. I said it.
Taking us at long length through the most mind-bendingly clever strategies to save the Earth from extinction at the hands of the Trisolarans, their insidious henchmen and panoptic technology, Liu comes up with a lengthy way of telling so much of human past, future, desire, bureaucracy, treachery and bravery.
Liu's Dark Forest is finally a tragedy of galactic proportions. Few works have located the entire technological prospects for humanity in such tight bounds. In all the hard science fiction I can imagine, there cannot be much more to say. I fear what the next book will bring. But I must know, starting tomorrow.
So there’s the tip of the iceberg which is a story of hundreds of years of human terror, intrigue and bravery on the long cusp of an imminent alien invasion. In that invention alone he puts every other author to shame. Imagine. Aliens are coming. Everybody on Earth knows it. But the timetable is four hundred years. So how do people deal with it in the meantime? They go every direction of crazy, weird and brilliant. It takes three volumes and eons to tell the huge tale. It begins in Maoist China, depressing as hell from the start. What would the most brilliant scientist in that era think of mankind’s prospects when her father is executed as a political traitor to the Revolution in front of her face?
Fans of the new Netflix show are treated to a very well executed abstraction of the most salient details of the books. The narrative center is moved to London around the ‘Oxford Five’ and shows deft intelligence as well as youthful spark in its portrayals of the central characters, even as the book has dozens. They most certainly have to put together the next eight episodes. It gets so much better, and darker.
It is in this kind of speculative fiction that I find true challenges to my Stoic discipline. Just getting through ordinary life is taxing enough, but my bad habit is to investigate realms of utter despair and destruction in order to satisfy myself that my own pain is of the minor variety. Every problem of mine is a first world problem except for those of morbidity and mortality. I go dark places but I don’t think I am becoming darker. I’ll have to check in on that matter next time I visit my therapist.
Perhaps this is something we all do to our detriment. We worry about our own first world problems and then comfort ourselves by paying attention to the misery of others. I am currently under some stress, as perceptive readers have seen, and am not currently free to let my mind wander to a meta level at which some reasonable analysis can consider tangential solutions. I’m just glued to my book and watching future humans in three-dimensional space slowly being compressed into a two-dimensional singularity. I hope to be free of Cixin Liu’s portraits of eons of suffering on the precipice of unlikely saving miracles. Maybe by this weekend I will be free of this literary chest cold.
I can still attest that suffering leads to humility and humility to wisdom, with a little luck. I may be a bug, but bugs persist.
Bug, or feature? Psalm 139 offers insight into the nature of darkness-and-light, which is One: "If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me." ¿Fellow stoic, are you familiar with Native American teachings on "wetiko"? Have you read M.Scott Peck's "People of the Lie?"? (Maybe browsing the free Kindle sample of "Dispelling Wetiko" by Paul Levy, will enlighten the darkness. Skip the Forward and ponder the Intro.) We "are all children of light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of the darkness." !Thes5:5 "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." 1John1:5. Blessings are ours today! ~eric. MeridaGOround.com