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I knew I read Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem last year, but I couldn't find a record of it! What's worse, I couldn't find a copy of it on my computer! The reason why I was looking for it is that I'm reading the Hugo Finalists for the Worldcon voting and his third book in the series is nominated, unfortunately I haven't read the second, but I think there's a considerable time lapse between the subsequent books.
Fortunately I found email evidence of when I read it (9/26), so here's an abbreviated mention of it.
This book, the first of Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, revolves around a strange and immersive video game that runs multiple generations resulting in total destruction of the game environment because of three suns have unpredictable and unstable orbits. It's actually a four-body problem because you also have the world that the game takes place upon: eleven other worlds in the system have been consumed by the suns. The culture survives incineration by dehydrating themselves and the husks being stored in deep underground vaults, waiting to be rehydrated some day when society has recovered.
It's a strange book that ties China's cultural revolution to modern times to extraterrestrial contact. Cixin Liu is an amazing writer with something on the order of eight Chinese Hugo awards to his credit. This and the third book of this series, Death's End, are translated by Ken Liu. The second book, The Dark Forest, was translated by Joel Martinsen. To cite Wikipedia, "The work was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006, published as a book in 2008 and became one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006. A film adaptation of the same name is scheduled for release in 2017. ... It won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel."
And that brings my 2016 total to 48 books read recreationally.
Fortunately I found email evidence of when I read it (9/26), so here's an abbreviated mention of it.
This book, the first of Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, revolves around a strange and immersive video game that runs multiple generations resulting in total destruction of the game environment because of three suns have unpredictable and unstable orbits. It's actually a four-body problem because you also have the world that the game takes place upon: eleven other worlds in the system have been consumed by the suns. The culture survives incineration by dehydrating themselves and the husks being stored in deep underground vaults, waiting to be rehydrated some day when society has recovered.
It's a strange book that ties China's cultural revolution to modern times to extraterrestrial contact. Cixin Liu is an amazing writer with something on the order of eight Chinese Hugo awards to his credit. This and the third book of this series, Death's End, are translated by Ken Liu. The second book, The Dark Forest, was translated by Joel Martinsen. To cite Wikipedia, "The work was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006, published as a book in 2008 and became one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006. A film adaptation of the same name is scheduled for release in 2017. ... It won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel."
And that brings my 2016 total to 48 books read recreationally.
