Sci-Fi

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.

Yes I read this book - don’t judge me. OK judge me. I read it 6 months ago and I’m really having a hard time remembering anything interesting or worthwhile. Guy tries to hide superpowers, fails, fights bad people, has high school problems. It’s like anamorphs but worse.

Throughout Neuromancer, I found it difficult not to be reminded of Snow Crash. It is clear that Neuromancer influenced Snow Crash- and I together they changed the course of Science Fiction and possibly influenced technological innovation of the past few decades. In both, the protagonist starts out a talented burnout at the bottom of his game, only to be chosen by the ruling powers of the time and sucked in to an epic struggle for the fate of the future dystopia. Both protagonists are more concerned about the digital world than the real one, and both authors offer a chaotic future where the 20th century nation-built world order has collapsed. ...

I couldn’t help be reminded of the Animorphs series that I read in elementary school. Too many aspects were the same, if only expanded to fill the 600 page hardcover. The narrative was straightforward peppered with lonely SAT words and inconsistent use of italics. But the novel wasn’t bad. Meyer seems to be trying to explore the rift between mind and body, and even if I didn’t feel much force in the events she described, at least I was entertained to think about it.

This week, my wife tested positive for COVID. We don’t know where she got it, may as well have been outer space. I watched our internal quarantine protocols fail as COVID spread to me and our son. We are no scientists, but this thriller was happening in real life in real time. When I read Andromeda strain 20 years ago, it was a page turner until the ending taught me the definition of anticlimactic. Nothing the scientists did mattered, because the virus independently mutated to harmlessness. After two years of lockdown and fear, today’s COVID has no symptoms for me, and is less severe than the last cold that passed through our household for my wife and son. While the plot of Andromeda Strain was emotionally disappointing, it was predictively dead on. ...