Fantasy

Worst grrm book I’ve read.

2026: OH MY GOD IT’S AN ALLEGORY FOR HUMANITY’S FIRST CONTACT WITH AI Original read: 2018 I…. didn’t get it. Maybe I’ll like the movie better?

Fit together nicely. Different perspectives, enjoyable fantasy.

Very much a direct continuation of the first book, didn’t expand the world as much as I expected, but also didn’t feel like the first half of a story which was nice.

Satisfying conclusion, pulled some of the same tricks as the original on a grander scale, but ended the series on a good note. Worth reading this series to the finish.

I was tempted by a tagline calling this book a combination of Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, and Game of Thrones. This book is not like Game of Thrones, and making such a comparison isn’t good for Red Rising. The worldbuilding was shallow and the politics dubious. Yet, like Ender’s Game or Hunger Games, once the games began, it was easy to keep the pages turning. As far as pure entertainment goes, this is probably the best book I’ve read this year. I appreciated the tone of anger and guilt that ran through the whole novel, and have already started in on the second book.

As good as everyone says it is. Don’t let the weird looking cover put you off. Go read it now. If you don’t believe me, go watch the trailer for the movie, then read the book.

I made the mistake of starting season 4 before all the episodes were out, then realized that I could just continue with the books. No more productivity next week.

I felt cheated, every time I started to enjoy a story, it would stop and I would be forced to read something else, by the time I got to cavendish part two, I lost motivation to continue. Not that I had time to, anyways, as Chinese studies left no time for English reading.I hoped that if I switched to Chinese I could filter out the annoying linguistic style and tone. But the translation surprisingly kept the tone of the original, only adding copious footnotes to explain obscure culture references that the chinese audience would have little way to decipher. By the time I made it to the end of the recursive equation, I had forgotten all but the sketchiest outlines of the previous mini-stories read 9 months ago in a different language. ...

This book seemed to be some combination of a 余华 novel about the cultural revolution, a fictionalized version of a Brian Greene book, and a Stephenson novel about some digital reality. I can’t say that it combines the best of those three authors, but as a fan of scifi, it is the most entertaining book I’ve read in Chinese so far. Some of the descriptions were a bit tedious, specifically the chapter when 三体 civilization creates a 智子: the first time around the result is a bunch of floating eyeballs in space, then a rainbow, then a sentient mirror that tried to destroy the planet, then a hyper-dimensional paired pseudo-AI capable of magic tricks on earth? This is probably a problem with my Chinese proficiency, but I was just confused. Still, I enjoyed the mildly technical descriptions, and the plot kept going with something of a scientific approach to the mysteries presented in the beginning. Perhaps most importantly, reading China-centric scifi is simply fascinating.