Book Recommendation: Remembrance of Earth's Past
Science-Fiction Trilogy by Cixin Liu
Tianming was terrified of space. Like everyone who studied spaceflight for a living, he understood space’s sinister nature better than the general public. Hell was not on Earth, but in heaven.
-Excerpt
The trilogy, comprised of “The Three-Body Problem”, “The Dark Forest”, and “Death’s End” is a monumental undertaking, a story sweeping centuries, covering humanity’s war for survival after discovering an alien race intent on coming to Earth.
The first part of the trilogy, "The Three-Body Problem”, has sadly become a Netflix show. I turned it off after 15 minutes, the Whedonesque snark1 really doesn’t fit with the very tender writing of the novel, which opens with a student mob beating a physics professor to death during China’s cultural revolution.2
I can’t say much about the story without giving too much away, but the strength is that the writer has a magnificent theoretical and scientific imagination, and that is combined with a rare, deep understanding of human psychologies and emotions. Usually sci-fi will lack one or the other.
Is it Proustian? The English trilogy title suggests so3, and it is a long, grand story, but the writing is not, and the story is more fast paced than those French volumes.
After loving the first book, I almost didn’t read the other two after hearing that it kind of went a little deranged later. That would have been a grave mistake. The story only gets more intense, tragic, and moving, as the trilogy progresses and I felt a great hatred and pity towards certain characters as I read on. Long epics can never offer the sharp perfection of an excellent novella, but something grander can evolve out of the author’s struggle against 100s or 1,000s of pages.
And I've always enjoyed Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Whatever you may think of the apparently unpleasant creator, it was a monumental television show, but we are oversaturated with poorly done imitations of that style these days, it’s unbearable.
I have read that in the Chinese version, this was placed in the middle of the novel to hide it from the censors. However, the English translator suggested placing it at the beginning, to which Cixin Liu apparently replied that that was where he wanted it to be in the first place.
“À La Recherche du Temps Perdu” was originally translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff as "Remembrance of Things Past", a reference to a Shakespeare Sonnet, though later translators typically used the more literal “In Search of Lost Time”.