[kstrauser]

My main issue with The Three-Body Problem is that the average people involved are implausibly hyperintuitive, like:

“What can we infer from this picture of a footprint?”

“Well, obviously the wearer enjoys rhyming couplets and has a child who is in the process of moving to Chile.”

“Look closer.”

“A-ha! I am embarrassed. Of course, they also sit in the window seat in airplanes.”

“And from that we can infer?”

“They would have solved this physics question already.”

“Indeed!”

Oh, sure, obviously.

[maxglute]

TBF most of the characters are not average, they're mostly super scientists, or super detectives or super whatevers selected for their intuition and problem solving. It's a series of fun scifi concepts (almost autistically) communicated by a bunch of cardboard scifi sherlock holmes. Which is fine by me since I don't care much for characterization.

[geoah]

Da Shi is pretty much a gun-ho version of Sherlock. Love him so much xD

[kstrauser]

He’s probably my favorite character.

[kstrauser]

That's a fair point, and that line of thinking made it readable for me.

But I doubt there's anyone on Earth that hyperintelligent.

[kstrauser]

spoiler

Also, "The Dark Forest" could've been shortened to a chapter if Ye Wenjie could have been bothered to just tell Luo Ji what she meant, saving a couple hundred years, hundreds of trillions of dollars, and untold human suffering in wasted efforts.

[snapcaster]

I wonder if she understood the solution though? Understanding the principles she explained and being able to leverage them in a meaningful way to solve the present problem are two different things. It felt to me like she just framed the problem and Luo Ji solved it but I guess we'll never know how much she didn't say

[kstrauser]

I inferred that she understood the conclusion of the axioms she handed down. Once Luo came to the same conclusion, he came up with a solution relatively quickly, and I’m not sure that the years he spent pondering the problem helped with that.

By analogy, it seemed as though Einstein came up with the general theory of relativity, and instead of publishing it, just gave his colleagues strong hints about which direction to look in. Thanks, I guess, but it would’ve been nice if you’d passed along “E=mc**2” so we could’ve started applying it in the mean time.

[wwarner]

i think you're missing the humor. i felt that the book is filled with a touch of humor about how we come to the conclusion that we actually know something.

[kstrauser]

I must be, because I don't recall any such parts being played for laughs.

[wwarner]

When the solarians, who have a totalitarian society of necessity, devote 100% of several decades their planet's energy and creativity to creating a subatomic weapon, and in the first demonstration it doesn't work and the president turns to to glare at the lead scientist, who says something like "oops", I thought that was written to be funny. To me the book is basically about the folly of human affairs, especially placing too much trust in science and scientists.

[lupire]

A lot of writing that is very funny on stage or screen doesn't work on the page. This is because delivery matters in dialogue, and actors study the scene to prepare their delivery, but a reader only gets one chance sight read it with no prep.

[wwarner]

yes, possible in my case here as i listened to the audiobook for book 1.

[kstrauser]

Huh, interesting. I confess I didn't get that at all, but perhaps it just bounced off me. It wouldn't be the first time.