Death's End, by Liu Cixin

This is a vast and fascinating book - the third in an engaging, far-reaching trilogy by the greatest Chinese sci-fi writer, Liu Cixin. I will try to review it without spoiling anything for those who haven't yet had the pleasure, although the title rather gives away the inevitable ending.


 
Across his Three Body Trilogy, Liu Cixin has offered a story of earth-versus-trisolaris, and later, in the second book, this scope is expanded with the dark forest philosophy to a chaotic, over-crowded universe of every-civilization-for-itself. In this final book, the seeds that were long ago planted have now come to be fully grown plants. It has been an incredible journey.

Yet Death's End (or The Birth of Death, as its Chinese title goes), is far grander in scope than the previous two novels, which now seem rather dull and uneventful by comparison. In the first book, which was probably the conventional best of the series, Liu took us back to the Cultural Revolution, and how the cruelty of humanity essential brought upon its own downfall. In the second, we saw how humans dealt with the inevitability of death from the cosmos, reeling in the knowledge that we were not alone, and suddenly rather tiny and fragile.

The third book in the trilogy spans tens of millions of years. Its protagonist takes advantage of hibernation technology to travel through time, visiting all of the most important moments in earth's history since "the Common Era" (ie what readers know as now). This is Cheng Xin, a woman who for some reason is constantly tasked with saving the world, and who constantly makes poor decisions. She is a quite likable character, but rather weak - perhaps believable but perhaps a little too "girly". I get the distinct impression that Liu is trying to make a strong female character but it is clear he really doesn't understand women very well. Through all his books, the women are rather poorly written.

In fact, that's this novel's greatest downfall - as with the previous two. Liu is obviously a great mind and he can theorize incredible happenings in the universe. His ideas are spectacular and he describes them pretty well... yet, he seems to struggle with humans. He's better at talking about the technology required to travel at the speed of light or destroy a galaxy than he is at putting two people together and having them talk. So be it. This is sci-fi after all.

Another downfall - and this may be the translator's fault - is that the metaphors liberally employed throughout are rather obviously stated. This occurs first in a strange opening scene, where a puddle is drying on a floor. We are twice informed that this is a metaphor for a dying civilization. Any writer worth his salt knows not to deliberately state that a metaphor is a metaphor.

Granted, this is a translation from Chinese to English. There are certain cultural quirks to understand, and certain translation issues. Stating the obvious and repeating the obvious is not considered a bad thing in Chinese, so maybe that caused this little issue. Anyway, this translation is superior to those of the previous two novels. It is also interesting to see the future from a Chinese perspective, as China may actually have far more of a role in the future history of the earth than Hollywood and Western novels like to suggest. Liu envisages a world where people speak a hybrid of Chinese and English, and where a rather large percentage of the clever folk have Chinese names... Not too give too much away, but by the end of the book it's really only Chinese characters who have anything to do with anything. The non-Chinese characters mostly avoid stereotypes but often speak in odd, clunky ways that are not really believable.

Regardless of its faults, this was a long, long, long trilogy which held my attention and entertained me throughout. I probably enjoyed the first book the most, and the second disappointed me quite a bit, but the third was a gripping story with an absurdly large number of events unfolding over tens of millions of years. I'm absolutely not a fan of science fiction, yet this managed to entertain me immensely, and I highly recommend it.

How Lenin and Stalin Brainwashed Russians, by Larisa Vetrova

How Lenin and Stalin Brainwashed Russians uses propaganda posters from the early years of socialism in Russia to tell the story of the nation's dark modern history. The posters themselves are illuminating and the history is fascinating, but sadly the book is written in quite poor English. It is a short read, almost possible to finish in a single sitting, but unfortunately the experience is spoiled by the unnatural prose. With a little editing, this could be a very enjoyable book. 

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinaw

Sometimes I go online and feel like genius among idiots. Log into Facebook and you're surrounded by people trying to explain away the latest idiotic ranting by Donald Trump, or parroting a hip meme in the liberal community. Everyone, it seems, is stupid. 

A good way to feel like a complete idiot is to pick up a book like The Grand Design. From start to finish I struggled badly to comprehend much of what was said. Physic has never been my greatest strength - in fact, I didn't even take it in high school and have always struggled with its basic concepts. 

Yet I find science of all sorts utterly fascinating, and so I was eager to read what was touted as a book that was accessible to the lay person. There are no mathematical formulas; just basic descriptions and analogies to make these concepts easier to digest. It is a book that sets out to explain the whole universe, and that's precisely where it lost me. I guess my puny brain cannot comprehend that much information. 

In the beginning, Hawking sounds like a stoned college student. Take for example, the analogy of a goldfish in a bowl, looking out at the world. To him, the world looks very different to what it actually is, yet he can create certain rules from observations that can allow him to "see" the world. Then Hawking speculates that we are that goldfish... 

Although Hawking's analogies allow even people like me to follow along, I found myself lost more often than not. Often, the only thing I could follow were the constant stream of awful dad jokes scattered through the book. It seems as though every complex explanation is punctuated with some lame punchline.  

Aldous Huxley, by Nicholas Murray

When I was in Malaysia this summer, I reread Island, by Aldous Huxley. It's certainly not a great book, yet I was very interested in it and how it was written. I didn't know much about Huxley except for a few well-known facts - that he wrote Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, and that he died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.

Reading Island, I felt myself curious about what inspired him... It seemed that the book wasn't just a work of fiction, but rather that the fiction was a crude vehicle for his ideas about the perfect society. I was vaguely aware of the fact that's a sort of counterpart to Brave New World, his famous dystopia. So what exactly happened in his life to convince him that the island of Pala would be the perfect society.

To find out, I downloaded Nicholas Murray's biography. Of course, because Island was Huxley's last book, published just two years prior to his death, I didn't get the answers I wanted for quite a while. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating book. Huxley is a weird character - incredibly intelligent, bizarrely self-aware, and always on the move. Having now finished it, I almost feel as though I knew the man myself. Murray is indeed a talented biographer.

There were times it felt the biographer glossed over some unsavoury portions of the Huxley story, but he never entirely left anything out. Instead, he would mention and excuse anything that would detract from the Huxley legacy. For example, he often alluded to Huxley's interest in eugenics, but would always play it down and point out that it was fashionable at the time. He acknowledged the author's interest in dianetics, but played it down as just being interested in everything and never taking it seriously, which was likely untrue.

I will continue studying the life and works of Aldous Huxley with the goal of writing a long essay later this year on the subject of Island. There are other biographies of Aldous but Murray's was the only one available on Kindle. It does, however, appear to have the best reputation, building upon that of Sybille Bedford's earlier work with the advantage of new sources having come to light.