Archive for July, 2024

Review: Birnam Wood

Saturday, July 6th, 2024

I picked this up on a lark. I was between holds at my library and this was on on one of the digital shelves of new well-regarded books. Something in the summary caught my eye, so I grabbed it. It was more than I expected.

Birnam stuck the landing in a way that few books I’ve read have. I thought I’d read one kind of book, and in the last few pages realized I’d read quite another. I admired the second one much more.

For obvious reasons, I don’t want to say more. Have a look at the blurbs and if it sounds remotely interesting to you, check it out.

You may reach the end and feel like it was a straight line. I think it’s probably a good read even if that’s the case. You may be surprised by and be put off. I just don’t know. But I know I think it’s quite a book.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Three Body Problem

Saturday, July 6th, 2024

Overall I liked The Three Body Problem. I think it’s a well executed SF novel with a lot of twists and turns. There’s enough hard science thrown around that part of the fun is deciding if this is just a near future thriller, or just where and how far things are going to come off the rails. There’s a nice tension to it that keeps you reading.

Liu sets the book primarily in China, primarily in the early 2000’s with big chunks in later 20th Century flashbacks. As an American reader, I found it interesting to see the differences and parallels between the same periods in the US and China. There’s a nice use of footnotes by the author and translator to both flesh out the world and keep the reader off-balance. Some are just “here’s a relevant fact from Chinese history or slang that you might not know” while others reference the history of the fictional world Liu is creating.

There are lots of interesting ideas to chew on about idealism and practicality, about how understanding the broad picture may not determine individual cases, and other lofty stuff that doesn’t get in the way of a fast moving plot in a shifting world.

If there’s anything I didn’t like, it might be that the characters didn’t suck me in as people. Some of that may be thematic. Liu may be treating them less as people to meet than as complex interacting systems. It’s nowhere as stark as that sentence makes it out to be. These folks are drawn with more depth than stereotypes. They have individual motivations and histories that help explain who they are and I recognize them as unique. But I also see how they’re the initial conditions of a complex system that expresses itself as this novel.

And I don’t think that’s just because I’m a nerd.

Highly recommended.