I held off reading this for the longest time because I didn’t like the first one all that much and I’d heard that the English translation, by Joel Martinsen this time instead of Ken Liu, was kind of weak. Still I kept running across references to it such as how even Barack Obama is a big fan and went to meet author Liu Cixin. I also realized that even in the English-speaking world, big idea science-fiction novels are rather rare and this is nothing if not all about big ideas.
John Scalzi is pretty prominent in science-fiction circles currently and it wasn’t so long ago that he made his debut with the Old Man’s War series which I haven’t read yet. A big part of it is due to his holding the post of president Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and taking a strong stand on feminist issues and against Gamergate and related alt-right controversies. This particular novel won the Hugo Award in 2013 which brought it to my attention then. But the premise seems so obvious that it’s a wonder no one wrote this novel before this.
This is certainly a well-known novel, popular enough to merit its own television series adaptation. I still wouldn’t have read it if it weren’t for the recommendation in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great who is puzzled over why it hasn’t been more influential. I’d guess that most writers aren’t up to the task of emulating its unique writing style and are put off by the immense amount of research required to pull off something like this. The project seems to have taken a lot out of her as she has yet to produce its long awaited sequel.
This is the first novel of The Witcher series proper as the first two books were collections of short stories. Intriguingly, it feels less like Geralt’s story than that of Ciri and one does feel the stage becoming bigger as we gear up to events that change the fate of nations, including the human-scale stories of the previous books. It also marks the first appearance of Triss Merigold and it’s rather surprising that Triss plays the part of the mother figure to Ciri before Yennefer comes into the picture.
This was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards though it ended up winning neither of them. I was intrigued by a Broken Forum member describing its premise as a science-fiction mystery novel. Unfortunately the premise is the best thing about the novel. Though author Mur Lafferty sets up the mystery beautifully, the way it plays out wasn’t satisfying to me as the plot revolves around a single malefactor whose identity can easily be predicted by the reader but is pieced together by the characters only at the end of the novel.
So yeah, I’ve never read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books before this which is embarrassing for a fan of science-fiction. I’ve read plenty of his short stories and even one or two his Robots novels but never any of the Foundation books themselves. I’ve inevitably absorbed some of what it’s about through cultural osmosis but I suppose it’s high time that I actually read them for myself.
So I decided to pay a bit more attention at what happens at the Hugo and Nebula Awards every year. Browsing through the list of nominees, I noticed this among the novellas, a work by a relatively new Singaporean writer JY Yang that is sometimes described as being in the ‘silkpunk’ genre. It was published together with the second book of the series Red Threads of Fortune as a bit of an experiment though each is short enough that I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as a single book. I only bought this one first to check it out however.
