So let me get this straight:
There’s a powerful nation coming towards Earth to wipe us all out before we get advanced enough to protect ourselves because they both want what we have and don’t want to give us the opportunity to build up, and they also have people here among us who despise the current people in charge and think the foreign invaders will be better for us all.
Additionally even as we live under threat of oncoming invasion, people still want to believe “surely they’re not as bad as we think they are; look how advanced they are!”
The only thing that also turns them away finally? We create a mutually assured destruction weapon, and this is what finally stop the invasion and makes the invader behave themselves; meanwhile, people here on Earth are actually really getting into the cultural works of the people who want to invade us; we listen to their music, read their philosophers, watch their movies, etc., and we believe that coexistence with the vastly more powerful foreign nation is entirely possible and things must absolutely be different now, surely.
Of course the most powerful, ‘needs to be ready to push the button’ person on the planet is now becoming more trusting of this former foe nation and thinks perhaps there really is middle ground between them and doesn’t truly want to even be in the position where they’d have to fight back against them, and in that moment of indecisiveness, in that moment of weakness, the foe nation already had the means of our destruction at our doorstep, waiting for a weak ‘leader’, and starts the war to annihilate us.
Watching this it definitely felt like a dig at American soft power and how the only thing that stops us from invading places like the DPRK are deterrents or MAD weapons, and also how we like to build up treasonous groups who oppose their own countries thinking we’re going to be in it for their sakes.
Considering the portrayal of Ye Wenjie as the woman who dooms the world because of the trauma the cultural revolution gave her (meanwhile a woman being too soft is the reason the aliens win later), and that all life in the universe is inherently xenophobic and resource obsessed, I suspect any good politics are accidental
trauma the cultural revolution
The modern CPC is also very critical of the Cultural Revolution to be fair.
all life in the universe is inherently xenophobic and resource obsessed
Dark Forest Theory doesn’t imply that all life is xenophobic and resource obsessed, just that civilisations have to assume that other civilisations are on the chance that they are. Rolling the dice is potentially existential so you have to assume the worst of everyone, but that doesn’t mean everyone is actually the worst.
Absolutely will not argue with you on Liu’s gender brainworms though.
Dark forest theory kind of sucks though, because all it takes is for a few non-shithead species to openly band together and murder dark forest societies, and the local calculus changes drastically towards federation.
But how do they band together if they can’t communicate? Under Dark Forest potentially-friendly civilisations can’t contact each other at all because they can’t take the risk of revealing their position to a malicious one.
right, but all it takes is a few stupidly trusting civs clustered together with no malicious ones nearby, and by the time they encounter one they’re the local hegemon, and by the time they’re big enough to attract a bigger malicious civ they’ve encountered dark forest theory and countered it. In fact I’d say the dimensional collapse weapon was first invented as a desperate survival strategy by a dark forest civ against a federation.
The entire novel is kind of predicated on first contact being a jealous civ of assholes who grew up in hellworld, and not, say, The Culture.
The three body problem is basically written by a 2000s era Chinese upper class liberal nationalist with an extreme anti Maoist kneejerk response. and has the realpoltick ideology of such.
Compare Pantheon by the guy who did the English translation, who is an American liberal but features a very positive portrayal of a committed neo-maoist.
The problem with that reading comes in later books
basically the thesis of the series
Where every society is just like that as the default.
deleted by creator
Sequels are just inherently reactionary (no I will not elaborate)
For a lot of them, it’s probably just that there are inherently interesting questions in society, and their plots are their best answers to that. Therefore, the result is liberals writing libslop.
At the same time, there are probably others that have an interesting pitch, with plans to write something radical, but are then stifled by liberal publishers and producers and so on. The result: ‘we loved the pitch… but maybe we could take it in a different direction???’
These producers either won’t tolerate your different viewpoint, or are frightened of the optics of publishing something like that because they don’t want any controversy.
The core remains, the interesting hook remains, but the story gets weathered off by the end. Either the writer quits, capitulates, or gets in a fight and negotiates for all sorts of little details that might let people into what they really think. It’s like Shakespeare with King James.
I’m very early in a writing career, and I’ve already had my work neutered and censored. I wasn’t even working with a large company, and I wasn’t saying anything that I thought was too controversial.
deleted by creator
I support the abolition of nuclear weapons…
For western countries.
Cynicism towards the west is not only well earned, its downright suicidal not to follow through on
Liu Cixin read realist international relations theory and decided to write a sci-fi book about it. I think you’ll naturally get dynamics to look like real life from that.
I think he also has stand ins for Donald Rumsfeld and Osama bin Laden who both make appearances in the second book.
I think Bin Laden in that book is supposed to be the real life Bin Laden (remember that it originally came out in China when he was still alive), unlike everyone else in the book who’s a fictional character who may or may not be a stand in for a real person (Rey Diaz probably most obviously being Chavez). His name just isn’t outright said for some reason, maybe because he’s a real person.
Probably, but no doubt most people watch it and think “alien=immigrants”
I never saw like that reading the books, but that might be because they’re pretty reactionary and the US is portrayed in a relatively positive light.
yea pretty much, comrade Kaplya posted a thought experiment on the news mega talking about the book, and its pretty much how chinese liberals see their relations with the USA, which “should China do MAD if they are attacked by a USA nuclear strike?”
most people said yes
I think the trisolarans are meant to be imperial Japan
