this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
2 points (100.0% liked)

Fiction Books

923 readers
9 users here now

The discussion of fiction books! Please tag spoilers and follow instance rules.

To find more communities on this instance, go to: [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
2
The writing in The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu) feels tacky (self.fiction)
submitted 1 year ago by lightsecond to c/[email protected]
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I have been reading the English translations and the characters and especially their dialogues feel very fake. I do appreciate the hard science aspect of the books but the long monologues, kids speaking like middle-aged philosophers, and army personnel being one-dimensional macho men breaks the immersion for me. It has the depth of a 1980s low-budget thriller.

I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction or translations of Chinese books. I don’t know if this is genre-related.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Reader9 3 points 1 year ago

the author is more interested in how humanity as a whole would react to his fictional scenario than he is with writing characters with depth

This was my impression as well and I think it works only because the fictional scenarios are extremely creative along with sometimes gratuitous science-fiction details from the author’s imagination. And even though most characters seemed unrealistic as people I still liked them as characters and found them memorable.

I also read (listened to) Voyagers by Ben Bova recently and while the fictional scenario was interesting, the character development leaned heavily on the relationship between the hero scientist and the promiscuous young scientist, a writing style which I found more boring.