I whizzed through Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and its sequel The Dark Forest, sleeping very little during the week. It has been a long time since a book engrossed me as these did. I have started reading the final book in the trilogy, Death’s End; it seems that some of the plot elements from the Netflix adaptation are actually derived from this book. A quick perusal of the table of contents suggested to me that by this time, Liu Cixin had fully reached his “God Emperor of Dune” stage—but we will see if that prediction is correct once I have properly read it.
Ken Liu’s English translation read very well to me (but I cannot speak to its fidelity, as I do not know Mandarin). Chinese writing is often difficult to read for Westerners due to the pervasiveness of cultural references to legend and history going back thousands of years; Western radicals often find it difficult to understand Mao Zedong’s intent for the same reason, because of his habit of explaining everything in terms of semi-historical heroes and references to epics. I am grateful that Ken Liu chose the road of endnotes—if it were only thirty or forty years ago, I could very well imagine that the English translation would have been purged of all the cultural and historical richness in order to flatter Western readers’ ignorance of Chinese history.
(It is notable that many characters and settings in the Netflix adaptation have been changed from Chinese ones to Western ones: does Netflix really believe that a Western audience would still be unable to properly empathise with a terminally ill Chinese man, and could only understand the story if he were made into a Scot?)