The idea is ambitious, fantastic geek porn. For Liu, science has its poetry, and it’s not the elegance of laws we tend to think of when someone says that, but an awesome, terrible beauty of scale and helplessness.Ī late sequence in The Three-Body Problem-whose translation, by Ken Liu, is now out in paperback-depicts a massive project to unfold a single proton into two dimensions, etch microprocessor circuitry on to its surface, and turn it into a supercomputer. Yet Cixin Liu, the living legend of Chinese science fiction, sees a beauty in ideas themselves. The spectrum of literature on which science fiction and literary fiction run is often defined by a false divide between ideas and beauty: A ‘good’ hard sci-fi novel means new ideas told cleverly, an ingenious premise or a extrapolation of technology while a ‘good’ literary novel means old ideas told beautifully, with striking, poetic imagery, a slow, loving look at human experience, a solid New Yorker review with pull-quotes of lyrical sentences that show off the writer’s writerly microcompetence.
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