Bringing Chinese Science Fiction to the West
Did anyone else not enjoy the actual writing in <i>Three Body Problem</i>? I enjoyed the book from a speculative science and &quot;well this is different&quot; perspective, but the writing style and plotting were very difficult to parse through.<p>&quot;Show-not-tell&quot; isn&#x27;t much followed. Character development is light, to say the least. Most of the story takes place from the perspective of one of two characters, but then there&#x27;s one incredibly jarring chapter where the author goes, &quot;Oh by the way, I&#x27;m sharing a bunch of classified documents with the reader that neither character has ever seen.&quot; And apart from scenes with a single non-viewpoint character (the cop), most of the dialogue sounds more like a post-modern philosophy lecture than actual conversation between real people.<p>Some of this could just be cultural differences between Western and Chinese writing styles, or maybe things got lost in translation. I haven&#x27;t read enough Chinese literature to say though. For those who have read more, would you say Three Body Problem is typical of modern Chinese writing, or Chinese science fiction?