> implicit assumption that two civilizations cooperating would develop no faster than a single civilization From memory, the basic tenant of dark forest theory was 'In the time it takes to communicate, you could become more powerful than me.' My point is that if two+ interacting (I don't believe cooperation is strictly necessary) civilizations make technological progress at an exponentially faster rate than a single civilization, then they are highly unlikely to be outclassed. Furthermore, this provides a disincentive (where 3BP notes none) to wipe out other civilizations, as you're giving…
Fair enough statement, but it looks more like a direct translation from Chinese sentences to me. > "No Harry Potter local as no magic, ..." We don't publish localized Harry Potter (don't they? I am not sure) because magic fantasy is abandoned. > "... no god, no fiary after 1948." Why 1948? The year is not that meaningful for modern Hong Kong people, but it is a important year for China and Taiwan. At 1948, KMT was de facto defeated by CCP and start to retreat to Taiwan. > "Too violent no ..." A book cannot be published if it is too violent. > "It is not just the rule. It is the…
The first sentence is probably parsed wrong, Chinese fairy/mythological novels are very popular in China, they've surpassed Chinese martial arts novels which has broken my heart because the fairy/mythological novels suck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianxia_novel Note 仙 can mean fairy in Chinese, they are part of the Chinese category known as 仙侠 or 玄幻，which is Asian/Chinese themed fantasy that differs from Western fantasy novels because its about Taoism/Buddhism, Chinese dragons, demons, immortals and Chinese legends. As well Chinese magical fantasy or 奇幻 is still alive and well but…
I guess the piercing of my suspension of hard sci-fi disbelief happened in the 2nd book(?), where post-Fall they rebuild into a militarily space capable society with relatively advanced weaponry. If you're going to take 1,800 pages (English translation) to lay out your series, and you can't spare a few for 'well, now we're building giant fusion-powered warship fleets'? That's not anything approaching hard sci-fi in my book. Yes, all the technologies used on the ships are extrapolated and believable, but the realignment of society, economics, and the organization of such a construction…
Re: experiments started to produce arbitrary nonsense [leading to scientist suicides] That would normally stimulate scientists into trying to find the pattern of "arbitrary". If it's completely random, that's a discovery in itself. If it has a pattern, then the pattern becomes a subject of experiments and speculative models, even if "weird". It's roughly comparable to the observer seemingly affecting the results of quantum experiments. Scientists rarely quit or get bored just because they have no clear-cut explanation. Most of them like puzzles, even tricky ones more. Maybe the culture in…
Funny. I can look down my nose at David Weber’s wooden and cringeworthy characters and dialog, but at the end of the day, I lapped up every Safehold book. I don’t need my sci-fi to be literature, but I need the story to move every ten or twenty pages, or characters I care about. Character development is an alternative to plot development, basically, but to go along side your interesting science bits, you have to give me at least one of: A) short B) characters who I care at least slightly about C) a plot that moves faster than your average snail The Three Body Problem had none of the…
Ironically, while I always react to new Safehold books like children to candies, I find them to be overly long and spending too much time on introducing (and then killing off) characters whose names I won't remember by the end of the chapter - and it's something I don't remember feeling about 3BP. Then again, Uplift saga felt sluggish to me too at times. However, in all of those cases, the plot is good enough for me to like it. I guess I can bear overly long stories if they're still interesting stories. EDIT: > I can look down my nose at David Weber’s wooden and cringeworthy characters and…
> there was zero character development - beyond Luo Ji Da Shi (together with Luo Ji, my favourite characters), Ye Wenjie, Yun Tianming and Thomas Wade develop across the series. If you cast the various human masses, the Trisolarans and Sophon as characters, which they resemble, they—too—develop compellingly over the series. Certain family lineages also cast favourably as “characters”. It does take a different view of character development to make things pop. For me, the best part about the characters was experiencing Liu’s worlds through their odd perspectives. (Cheng Xin was not a…
Famous authors can write for the international translation market, essentially. A few months ago there was a submission about Yan Lianke's struggles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18206445 It's still possible to read banned books on the mainland if you know the right sites, but most consumers of banned literature are probably just looking for porn, so you might need to do some digging to find something more high-brow. I'm not sure what lesser-known authors do, but I guess they try to keep their fiction as fictional as possible.
> I also took issue with the implicit assumption that two civilizations cooperating would develop no faster than a single civilization. I don't remember that assumption; I felt the implicit assumption was that development of any civilization can experience unpredictable rapid acceleration, so even if two civilizations cooperated, it doesn't help them much against others out there. > Or, another way, that all civilizations would climb the same technology ladder the same way. That I think was explicitly denied in the basic axioms of Dark Forest theory - again, civilization's technological…