science fiction

The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu

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Cover of The Three-Body Problem


The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
Translation by Ken Liu
302 pages
published in 2008 (English 2014)

If it hadn’t been for Marko Kloos doing the honourable thing and withdrawing his nomination, The Three-Body Problem wouldn’t be on the ballot for this year’s Best Novel Hugo. And that would’ve been a shame, since The Three-Body Problem is the first translated novel to make the shortlist. The start of a trilogy, it originally came out in China in serialisation in 2006, with the novel version coming out in 2008. The English translation was done by Ken Liu, who has won a Hugo Award himself. The sequels will come out this year and next.

What makes The Three-Body Problem almost missing out on the Hugo shortlist deeply ironic, is that it’s exactly the kind of oldfashioned hard science fiction the people behind this year’s vote rigging were supposed to be all in favour of. It revolves around the mystery of why all those physicists are killing themselves, the answer to which seems to be that fundamental principles of physics are broken… There are some great moments of sense of wonder, of conceptual breakthrough in it, as well as some characters Asimov would think were a bit two-dimensional.

The Three-Body Problem starts in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, introducing Ye Wenjie, whose physicist father is killed by Red Guards, young, fanatic followers of Mao fighting against what they see as the counter revolution. Her younger sister is part of the Red Guards and is killed in a fight with the regular army. Ye Wenjie herself, because of her family background and intellectual tendencies is banished to the countryside, working in a “volunteer” labour battelion. It’s while she’s working on deforesting part of Inner Mongolia to remake the forest into farmland, that she comes into contact with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which will help provide the motivation for what she will do later. While under arrest for having the book on her, Ye Wenjie is recruited to help with the running of Red Coast, a secret PLA radio telescopy/listening post.

But just as her story seems to start, it moves to the present, with Ye Wenjie out of the picture until much later in the book. Instead we now follow Wang Miao, an academic working on nanotechnology, who is recruited by the socalled Battle Command Center, which turns out to be an international organisation, fighting a hidden war against an invisible enemy, a war fought against science. What the Battle Command Center in particular wants to know and needs him for is to understand why so many distinguished scientists and physicists have committed suicide.

In a scene that’s a direct homage to Isaac Asimov, a game of pool is used to first showcase the foundation of all physics/ We’ve discovered a great principle of nature: The laws of physics are invariant across space and time as one character puts it, before going on to explain that this is no longer the case:

“Imagine another set of results. The first time, the white ball drove the black ball into the pocket. The second time, the black ball bounced away. The third time, the black ball flew onto the ceiling. The fourth time, the black ball shot around the room like a frightened sparrow, finally taking refuge in your jacket pocket. The fifth time, the black ball flew away at nearly the speed of light, breaking the edge of the pool table, shooting through the wall, and leaving the Earth and the Solar System, just like Asimov once described.

That’s why scientists are committing suicide and what Wang Miao needs to figure out is who or what is behind it. This part of The Three-Body Problem reads like a techno thriller, as Wang Miao emerges himself in the conspiracy behind the suicides, getting cryptic hints from police captain Shi Qiang, rude and obnoxious but with a knack of saying just the right things to get Wang Miao to move forward.

It’s here that the central gimmick of the story is introduced, a virtual reality video game, Three Body in which Wang Miao is put in a world which vaguely resembles that of ancient China but with laws of physics that make no sense. His job and that of the other players is to figure these laws out and determine what’s going on.

Because I bought it as an ebook I read most of this in short snatches, frex waiting at the coffee machine at work. In retrospect, this hindered my comprehension of The Three-Body Problem‘s plot but helped my appreciation of the book as a whole. I would’ve seen most of the plot twists and shocking reveals coming, had I read it in a more sustained fashion, as Cixin Liu is far from subtle; indeed this has been one of the most common points of criticism leveled at The Three-Body Problem.

The Three-Body Problem of course refers to a classic physics problem and the virtual reality game has as its first goal to let its players figure out that the world they play in is subjected to this, a planet in a trinary solar system. Cixin Liu takes a while before he allows his protagonist to figure it out and perhaps it takes too long; a more observant reader would’ve gotten there much quicker.

Once that’s been figured out it’s a small step for characters and readers both to understand that the world of Three Body depicts an actual alien world and hence that aliens are behind the breakdown in physics. The rest of the novel revolves around understanding the history and gols of these aliens as well as what motivates their human collaborators. Which turns out to be an overwhelming sense of the failure of humanity to treat the world properly, so let somebody else try it, bringing the story back to Ye Wenjie, who turns out to have set everything in motion through her work at Red Coast.

In general The Three-Body Problem is an uneven book, oddly paced, with a build up in the first two parts that’s somewhat led down by its resolution in the third. What’s set up as a fundamental physicis problem basically turns into “aliens did it” with some technobabble about unfolding protons to make them into AIs. It’s a bit disappointing.

Also disappointing is the characterisation. The historical sections, telling Ye Wenjie’s story, are great, but every other character has to struggle to reach two dimensions. I don’t think this is a problem with the translation or differences between western and Chinese science fiction. Rather, there’s a reason Cixin Liu keeps reminding me of Isaac Asimov: he has a similar preferences for ideas over characterisation.

I didn’t read The Three-Body Problem in time to consider it for my Hugo ballot and I’m not sure I’d would’ve traded in one of my choices for this. The question now though, since it is on the Hugo shortlist, should I vote for it and if so, in which place? I won’t be upset if it does win the Best Novel Hugo, though I think I still prefer The Goblin Emperor over this.

Hero Complex — Sean O’Hara

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Ryder leaps onto the wall of an apartment building and runs straight up the side. She’s almost to the eaves when she jumps again, this time somersaulting high into the air, coming to apogee several yards above the monster. She flings her arms apart and the night is illuminated by stroboscopic beams from her—I’m not seeing that right. There’s no way she’s shooting lasers from her boobs.

“Of course not. That would be ridiculous,” Jensen says.

I thought as much, but given how many ridiculous things have occurred lately, I wanted to be sure.

Ryder snags a tree branch with an outstretched hand like it’s a trapeze and flips herself around.

“Everyone knows laser beams are invisible in clear air. Those are charged particle cannons,” Jensen says.

Cover of Hero Complex


Hero Complex
Sean O’Hara
394 pages
published in 2014

Whether or not you’ll like Hero Complex can probably be determined by whether not the previous passage intrigues or annoys you. Needless to say I did find it intriguing and wanted to subscribe to its newsletter. Sean O’Hara is somebody I know from having hung around the same online spaces for years, which always helps when deciding whether or not to try a book.

As you might have guessed from the extract, Hero Complex isn’t an entirely serious novel, though there is a harder edge to it than is at first apparant. As such it reminded me of Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen series, which started out as lighthearted superhero fanfic but got dark quickly. The same is the case here. The protagonist, behind his first person smartarse persona, is suffering from an unhealed trauma, hiding a dark secret, something that will drive his actions through the story.

But it takes a while for that trauma to surface and at first Hero Complex looks like an affectionate parody of what you might call a harem anime, where you have the high school hero getting involved with a group of Strange Girls Who Are More Than They Seem. That’s what seems to happen to Erik when he’s recruited (or rather, pressganged) for his school’s drama club, after an unfortunate accident involving all its male members leaving.

Cue a bit of sexual tension between him and Jensen, the resident hardcase of the group, who makes it clear she doesn’t like him (nor he she), which, as any fule kno, is a sure sign of mutual sexual attraction, something that doesn’t go uncommented on by the other girls. That knowing commentary and genre savvy displayed by many of the characters, helps reinforce the fanfic feeling of the story, again like McGuire’s Velveteen.

It doesn’t take long for the plot to grow darker, as it turns out the drama club has a more important mission than amateur theatre and somebody isn’t happy Erik joined up with them. Before long he’s involved in running battles with this unknown enemy, which turns out also to mostly consist of high school girls. What in fact turns out to be the case is that both groups come from a fantasy world not unlike Zelazny’s Amber, a world with a higher order of reality and are waging their civil war on Earth. Like Amber, our world is a mere shadow of theirs.

Where it differs, and also where the story goes properly dark, is in how O’hara shows the consequences of these battles, showing how one battle completely destroys the all night restaurant Erik used to hang out at, killing everybody inside. Reality can reset itselfs once such a magical battle has ended, but it’s clear that this restoration isn’t complete. The people murdered may live again, but they’re not quite the same.

Hero Complex is the first in the My Dark and Fearsome Queen series; I’m not sure I’d want to read the next volume right now. Enjoyable as this was it was also somewhat uneven, with the mood swings between light and serious giving me a bit of whiplash. I’m not sure Erik’s tragic background works all that well with the rest of the story O’Hara wants to tell: it’s slightly too real for a story of school girl warbots armed with laser tits. Another small annoyance is that Erik’s dialogue wasn’t put in quote marks, which took some getting used to. Nevertheless, a good debut.

Sterrensplinters — Eddy C. Bertin

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Cover of Sterrensplinters


Sterrensplinters
Eddy C. Bertin
222 pages
published in 2013

Eddy C. Bertin was an important author in my personal Golden Age of science fiction. A Flemish author, he was one of the few science fiction writers writing in Dutch back in the late seventies & eighties. Dutch language science fiction has never been particularly abundant and most that was published was not very good. Bertin was one of the few exceptions, an author who could’ve found an audience in English as well (and indeed, has had a couple of stories published in English). Still active, Bertin has written everything from hard science fiction to dark fantasy and horror, often mixing genres and with a tendency towards the Lovecraftian end of horror.

Sterrensplinters (Star Splinters) is a 2013 anthology collecting some of his best stories taken from his 1970s and 1980s collections. These are all long out of print, so a new collection of them is very welcome. The short introduction doesn’t tell much about why exactly these stories were chosen, or why the collection had to be divided into two parts: Membranen and Splinters, other than that the first set of stories takes place in a shared universe, while the remainder are standalone. That second set of stories feels as an afterthought, even if it includeds one of Bertin’s most famous stories.

No, the real meat of the collection is in that first section, showcasing some of the key stories from his Membrane future history. This is a very seventies sort of future history, in that the coming psychic and psychadelic revolution lead to the liberation of the mind through a new class of drugs, freeing the long hidden ultracentre within the brain, that enabled jumps through ultraspace and the conquest of the universe. Fortunately however Bertin was enough of a cynic to not make this into a hippy-drippy cosmic love sort of universe, but instead the monopoly on those ultrapsych drugs was held by powerful companies like Afrostellar and LBL, underpinning an imperialistic, capitalistic, expansionist world order that looked forward to cyberpunk.

There’s also more than a hint of Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe about the Membrane universe, unknown dangers lurking in the depths of ultraspace, attracted to the splashes human ships make in it, while in the real universe humanity despite its belief in its own propaganda, may not be a match for more cunning, more aggressive species. There’s a barely controlled chaos behind the gleaming facade of the setting, a sense of moving towards a predestined doom for the entire universe. In fact, the Membrane stories were originally collected in three books: Eenzame Bloedvogel (1976), De Sluimerende Stranden van de Geest (1981) and Het Blinde Doofstomme Beest op de Kale Berg (1983), with that third featuring that ultimate doom, The Blind, Deaf-Mute Beast on the Bald Mountain that waits in the Membranes at the end of the universe…

Membranen:

  • “Een Stuk van je Gezicht” (A Part of Your Face, 1976)
    This hasn’t aged well, the story of an ultranaut that is fleeing something in his own past, stuck in an endless loop in ultraspace and with something having taken the role of his dead partner. It hasn’t aged well because the story’s conflict is rooted in the idea that it would be acceptable for a male-female partnership to be sent out to explore an alien planet while the woman also has to satisfy her partner’s sex drive, but refuses to.
  • “De Droom is een Dood” (The Dream is a Death, 1981)
    A short vignette about some of the other uses the Ultrapsych drug can be used for, like capturing the last dreams of a dying man…
  • “Voor de Liefde van Virginia Clemm” (For the Love of Virginia Clemm, 1977)
    One of Bertin’s best stories, in which his own personal obsession with Edgar Allan Poe comes to the fore, as an Ultraspace explorer gets stuck in Poe’s brain and watches him self destruct. It’s an incredibly seventies story, which is what makes it so charming.
  • “Berlijn, Ze Branden Je Muren Neer” (Berlin, They Burn Your Walls Down, 1978)
    Did I say the previous story was seventies? This was even more so, an ode to the rock and roll obsessions of the baby boom generation growing older. In New Berlin, for his greatest concert ever, the greatest membrane rock star ever ponders his dark secret, the passenger he picked up traversing the ultraspace membranes, a passenger that will kill one of his audience as they merge membranes with him… Featuring robot doubles of Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy as part of the stage act, just to date this even more. Great story though, for all its surface silliness.
  • “Als Ik Doodga voor Ik Wakker Word” (If I Die before I Wake, 1994)
    The only new story in the collection for me, written long after the bulk of Bertin’s Membrane stories had been written. An experiment to create a fractal human able to exists in the ultraspace Membranes unaided, lures something from the depths of ultraspace towards it, something both alive and not, something hungry…
  • “Rode Hemel met Stalen Bloemen” (Red Sky with Steel Flowers, 1983)
    The mutated survivors of a Terran-Cappellan battle on a small, unimportant planet sustain themselves on the fruit of the steel flowers that fall down from the sky at regular times. Only the reader realises that these are in fact the cryochambers of the survivors of the space battle that destroyed their planet twohundred years before…

Splinters:

Most of these stories are pure O’ Henry type shockers, with a bizarre scenario set up and the truth behind it revealed at the end of the story. Even when first published these were somewhat old fashioned, which reveals somewhat of the level of sophistication Dutch language science fiction operated (and still operates). These aren’t bad stories, just the kind of story you’d see as filler in some monthly magazine.

  • “Deuren 1 tot en met 5” (Doors 1 to 5, 1982)
    An astronaut lands on a strange planet, empty and barred save for one door. When the door turns out to talk, what follows is a test: but who’s testing who?
  • “Alle Schaduwen van de Angst” (All Shadows of Fear, 1971)
    The sole survivor of a alien invasion lives in the shadows of their presence, in fear of discovery. But do the aliens really exist, or do they mask a much more frightening reality he’s trying to ignore?
  • “In de Stervende Stad” (In the Dying City, 1971)
    It’s only when he discovers he’s a mutant and has to flee the city, that the protagonist realises that the oppressive authoritarian regime ruling it is doomed, as is the city itself, despite its technological prowess.
  • “De Achtjaarlijkse God” (the Eight Yearly God, 1969)
    On a post-apocalyptic Earth, God is closer than ever and shows his wrath every eight years.
  • “Tijdstorm” (Time Storm, 1971)
    Due to an unforeseen time storm Harvey Lonestall accidently enters the far future headquarters of conspiracy to force Earth’s history into a dark path. He now has the opportunity to bring Earth’s history back to the path it should’ve taken — but is this really the right choice?

The Fall of Chronopolis — Barrington J. Bayley

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Cover of The Fall of Chronopolis


The Fall of Chronopolis
Barrington J. Bayley
175 pages
published in 1974

I’ve always been a sucker for time war novels, starting with Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time and Keith Laumer’s Imperium series. I like the grand scale on which these stories play out, the whole idea of the impermanence of time itself, something that undercuts our most basic of securities, the idea that the past we remember is the way that past has always been, making literal the idea Orwell put forth in 1984: he who controls the past, controls the future. Which explains why The Fall of Chronopolis was one of the first bought at Eastercon novels I finished, even before the convention itself was over, finishing it at the Dead Dog party on Monday.

In the The Fall of Chronopolis the time war rages between the Chronotic Empire, which has steadily increased its dominion over the centuries until it rule a thousand years of human history and its far future enemy, the Hegemony, existing futurewards beyond the Age of Desolation after the fall of the Chronotic Empire. For the most part this time war has been limited, consisting of limited raids on each other’s history, but the Chronotic Empire is raising a grand fleet of timeships to invade the Hegemony directly, while the latter had developed a time distorter which can warp history directly. But this is only the surface story; there’s a lot more going on

Bayley’s conception of time travel consists of a “temporal substratum” or strat that the time ships fly through, which would make any time traveller insane if they looked at it directly. The strat exists “below” orthogonal time, in which history is made, remade and unmade, entiry cites be cast into nonactual, merely potential time. Only within the strat can alterations of history be seen and remembered, at least for a time. From within the strat the warring parties could fight in a duel of moves and countermoves aimned at altering their opponent’s history to such an extent their time ships no longer had an orthogonal base of existence; they could still exist in the strat, for a while, until they faded out, sinking into what the Church calls the Gulf of Lost Souls.

What’s more, time is divided in nodes, as explained in a very traditional “as you know, Bob” classroom lecture at the start of the second chapter, nodes each roughly 150 years apart, as orthogonal time has a wave structure. Time travel is easiest from node to node, as it doesn’t cost a time traveller energy to remain in a node. Travel to points of time inbetween nodes does and the traveller needs to keep spending energy to keep in phase, or sink back into the substratum. This gives the empire its structure and stability, having expanded over seven such nodes.

Captain Aton commands one of the time destroyers in the empire’s fleet and during one battle with the Hegemony he falls foul of a sect of Traumatics, heretics split off from the true church and worshipping what they believe is the master of strat time, Hulmu. In a seperate plot line, a woman, Inpriss Sorce, is chosen at random by the same Traumatics sect to serve as a sacrifice for their service, but first they’ll get her to flee across the entire Chronatic Empire, to make the offer sweeter. Her and Aton’s paths will cross but seem to have no connection, until the very end.

Ultimately Bayley knots all these plots and subplots into one grand finale, in which in the grand tradition of time war stories, time is revealed as an eternal loop, already foreshadowed in the belief of the emperor as the soul as eternal in time, caught in a loop along its own time line.

A lot happens in 175 pages, helped a lot by the breezy, pulpy style Bayley tells his story, very old fashioned for a novel originally published in 1974. This must’ve been a deliberate choice to tell the story this way. Bayley after all was one of the New Worlds school of New Wave writers, people who took apart and reassembled traditional science fiction, injecting literary techniques from other genres in it. The time war subgenre is quintessential pulp science fiction, but also a genre that has lend itself well to experimention. I still maintain Asimov’s entry was the best novel he’d ever written, while Leiber’s was an exercise at greating the grandest possible canvas in the smallest possible setting. Bayley’s story fits in well with this tradition.

Short SF Marathon: Recap

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So what have we learned from reading the almost 100 stories on this list? That there were actually quite a few excellent fantasy and science fiction stories published last year, that even when coming already curated there’s so much stuff out there you can easily drown in it and that there a fair few writers doing interesting things at the short story level I hadn’t heard of before I started this, who I like to see more off.

Of the stories on the list, the following got nominated for one of the short fiction Hugo Awards by me:

Rachel Swirsky, “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap).” Subterranean, Summer 2014.

A brilliant story about a daughter and a father and how they cope with her impending death. I’d call it a 21st century Helen O’Loy if that wasn’t a creepy sexist bit of sentimental shite and this isn’t.

Veronica Schanoes, “Among the Thorns.” Tor.com, May 7, 2014.

Re-imagining a horribly anti-semitic Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch.” Granta, October 28, 2014.

A very meta, very allegorical, feminist sort of fantasy story.

Yoon Ha Lee, “Wine.” Clarkesworld, January 2014.

A great space opera sort of science fiction story, with a trans protagonist.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, “A Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon A Star.” Tor.com, July 20, 2014.

You could argue that this isn’t science fiction, but this is a story that concerns itself with everything science fiction should concern itself with in the 21st century.

Ruthanna Emrys, “The Litany of Earth.” Tor.com, May 14, 2014.

A Lovecraftian story that refutes Lovecraft’s racism.

Alyssa Wong, “The Fisher Queen.” F&SF, May/June 2014.

“The Fisher Queen” is perfect, already a Nebula nominee and deservedly so. It’s a story about a fisher girl from the Mekong delta who one day learns the truth behind her father’s joking that her mother was a mermaid. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as a feminist fairy tale.

Damien Angelica Walters, “The Floating Girls: A Documentary.” Jamais Vu 3, September 2014.

A very simple story about an unexplained wave of girls, well, just floating up into the air and the indifference with which it is greeted. It feels very much of the moment, a response to things like GamerGate and such.

Kelly Sandoval, “The One They Took Before.” Shimmer #22, November 2014.

An urban fantasy story that looks at what happens after you get back from fairy land. It reminded me a bit of Jo Walton’s Relentlessly Mundane, about the same general emotions of loss and bitterness, but in a different key so to speak.

Rachael K. Jones, “Makeisha in Time.” Crossed Genres #20, August 2014.

Almost impossible, but Rachael K. Jones has managed to write a novel time travel story, of a woman who keeps getting pulled back into the past to lead entire lifes there, only to return to the exact method she left, her family and friends none the wiser, and how she adapts to this. A great story.

Xia Jia, “Tongtong’s Summer.” Translated by Ken Liu. Clarkesworld, December 2014 (originally in Neil Clarke (ed.), Upgraded, Wyrm Publishing, 2014).

Xia Jia writes about the impact of high technology on everyday life and here tackles a very contemporary subject, the use of robots to help an aging population cope with day to day life. In this case Tongtong’s grandfather, in his eighties but still working at the clinic every day until a bad fall, has to come live with them, so Tongtong’s mother could take care of him. Because she and her husband both work, Tongtong’s father brings home a robot, an Ah Fu, to help them. Which isn’t actually a robot, but a tele-operated machine run by an intern for the company Tongtong’s father works for: real robots don’t work and full time carers are too expensive.

Apart from that I also recommended Carmen Maria Machado, Bogi Takács & Usman Malik for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer based on their stories; all were in their second year of eligibility.

On a more negative note, a couple of these stories were just not very good:

Harry Turtledove, “The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging.” Tor.com, January 8, 2014.

Am I the only one who found this story about an Anne Frank who survived WWII on the creepy side, and not in a good way, especially coming from somebody who made his name essentially writing Slaver Rebellion fanfiction? It doesn’t help that it’s so damn pious about it all, with huge chunks of as you know Bobbery about the Holocaust and what happened to the Dutch Jews in World War II. It’s a very American way of looking at the Holocaust and an approach I find suspicious at the best of the times. I much prefer Lavie Tidhar’s way of handling it, much more willing to take risks with such a heavy subject.

Mary Rickert, “The Mothers of Voorhisville.” Tor.com, April 30, 2014.

This is a stupid story about stupid people doing the most stupid thing possible because they have to adhere to the conventions of genre fiction, so nobody ever talks to anybody else until it’s too late. It’s mired in gender essentialism and goes on for way too long.

Dale Bailey, “The End of the End of Everything.” Tor.com, April 23, 2014.

Now if we do want to talk about science fiction aping memetic, mainstream fiction, the worst it could do is to ape that cliched standby of fanboy sneers, the English professor with a midlife crisis contemplating infidelity. It’s the end of the world, the Ruin is creeping up on the artist colony Ben and his wife Lois have been invited to, but he can’t help thinking of his friend’s gorgous new wife or the mutilation artist living a couple of houses over. Bailey does have a way with a turn of phrase, but the dillemma at the heart of the story didn’t convince me, the allure of torture, death and mutilation was too bland, too safe when it doesn’t matter anymore because the world is ending anyway.