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Fascinating to learn about Chien-Shiung Wu, a pioneer in physics, and Mozi, an anti Confucian rationalist, who established schools of logic and was himself an engineer and geomoter, some hundred years before the rationalists of Leibnitz and Descartes. Good to see Orientalist notions of China as being externally obsessed with mysticism and Confucianism being punctured, and showing other strands of China's history.

Im also learning about Chinese history! The book almost feels like modern China's tortured relation with itself. Modern China is a technocratic science society at the height of efficency and expertise, the Mao era is just unbridled chaos that at best was merely a prelude to Xiapong, and the imperial past is seen with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. Which is basically the modern CCP's worldview to a T.

Like, this is fucking brilliant. I was enraptured by this from pretty much page 1. The sheer scale of Liu's conceptually framework, where the threat is not so much any kind pf recognisable alien but merely quantum physics being weaponised against it, is pretty breathtaking. The Three Body game parts are amazing, almost high fantasy in its intricate imagery and worldbuilding. So far its headed for a 5* rating.

This is fucking brilliant. The writing here is staggering, it is so good, dazzling phrases and descriptions just knock you out one after another. The first chapter is probably the single most devastating evisceration of the entire modern day academic system ever written. It's also screamingly funny. It's mad, bouncing off the walls with ideas, some of it a little odd. Later chapters are not as good. But still amazing

- there is a thin line between poetic and purple prose, and LeGuin often crosses over it. In Dispossesed it's horrific. But here it's nicely balanced.
- LeGuin does annoys me. I detest her mysticism, her cloying dewy eyed spirituality, her political quietism, her anarchist stupidities, her vauge, waffling non committal to truth or reason, her pretty reactionary contempt for modernism and rational planning.

- the gender swapping stuff, of a planet where natural transsexualism is the norm, and was a USP of this book to me, is hugely overstated. It appears to be little more than a gimmick, a kind of "Oh look ain't I progressive and thoughtful" throwaway idea that, so far, has no relevance to the plot. In fact, I'm convinced it's more of a Cold War analogy than anything, albeit a veeeery subtle one.

Thoughts so far:
- having hated the Dispossesed almost more than anything I've ever read, this is a demonstrable step up. Great, breezy writing that goes like the clappers, it flows like a long snaking river. But there are also some staggering flashes of beauty.
- the worldbuilding is, as you'd expect from her, phenomenal. While it was a tedious bore in Dispossesed, it is a rich texture here that elevates the plot.

""And you?" I said. "Why have you stayed home?"
It sounded like an accusation when it should have been a thank-you".

Do you know what else I love in books? When everything that should be subtext is simply said aloud as text. Cus, you know, I really hate having to use my imagination and work out things for myself. I hate thinking. It's just so darn hard. This is much better.

So good.

Number one bestseller!

Do you know what I love when reading a book? When each character, despite the fact they're different genders, live in different times, come from different countries and are completely different people, nevertheless sound exactly the same. Such a mark if great writing, that bland uniformity of tone. So good. So awesome.

"The only controls avaliable to those on board were two push-buttons on the centre of the cabin - one labelled on and the other off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martain mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off"

"There is no reason good should not triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organisation. If there are such things as angels, I hope they are organised along the lines of the Mafia"

"She held the grenade that Unk had given her as though it were a vase with one perfect rose in it".

"The recruits eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills"

There's so many good lines I should have really documented them here from the start. Poo bum and fart.

On p.129 and nothing has happened. Not a single solitary important thing. There is no plot. There are no characters. This is fucking dogshit. This is the author people go gaga over? This is the famed feminist mystic anarchist grandma that cultural theory students squee over? What a bunch of shallow imbeciles. Unending and crudely inserted tedious, boring exposition, with zero integration with the (non) events. Poor!

"On the Southern coast, between Merton and Sawboro, there is a strip of desolation some half a mile wide and nearly ten miles long between the sea and old fields of ruined plantations. Skirting the edge of this narrow jungle is a partly grown-over road which still shows trace of furrows made by the wheels of wagons that had long since rotted away or been cut into fire-wood." American Gothic - haunted by slavery.

Man, these stories are fucking brutal. Beautiful, but drenched in sorrow and regret, tainted by melancholy lingering for something unattainable. Some of these twists are crueler than anything in the Twilight Zone.

"His increasing mental haziness had rejected the fact of her death; often she was there with him, just beyond the candlelight. She talked and laughed with him. Sometimes, at night, he woke to see her standing over him or sitting in his chair before the dying fire...His twisted memories visioned her with him in in places where she had never been. He had forgotten all but the past, and that was brightly distorted"