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The writing in The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu) feels tacky (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by lightsecond@programming.dev to c/fiction

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I have been reading the English translations and the characters and especially their dialogues feel very fake. I do appreciate the hard science aspect of the books but the long monologues, kids speaking like middle-aged philosophers, and army personnel being one-dimensional macho men breaks the immersion for me. It has the depth of a 1980s low-budget thriller.

I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction or translations of Chinese books. I don’t know if this is genre-related.

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[–] oolong@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I loved this series but I consider the characters as a vehicle for the ideas. It’s not really a character-driven work; the author is more interested in how humanity as a whole would react to his fictional scenario than he is with writing characters with depth. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s related to the genre but there are a lot of examples of this type of writing in science fiction. I also loved Dune but I feel the same way about its characters to some extent.

[–] PseudoMon 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not being character-driven might explain why I didn't enjoy reading The Three-Body Problem, but in that case Dune is very character-driven by comparison! I love Dune! I find myself very attached to its characters and their relationships, both to each other and to the world at large.

I'm on the same boat as OP on The Three Body Problem. The writing feels dry, the characters don't feel real, and as a result I don't really care about what happens in the story. I've read a few media translated from Chinese and few are as dry as Three Body. I'm not sure if the translation is just poor (I've heard it's heavily edited compared to the original) or if that's just how the original writing is.

[–] MikeyMongol 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The translator is a novelist in his own right, and his Dandelion Dynasty series is quite good. It's not the translation. I suspect it's a combination of it being a hard-sf "ideas" book, and different national styles in novel writing.

[–] PseudoMon 1 points 1 year ago

Well as a translator myself, I can say translating and writing are VERY different skillsets! Entirely possible for someone to be good at writing in English but mediocre at translating to it (I am one such example 😔).

But yes, it seems likely the different styles and SF-hardness is more to blame than the translation itself.

[–] oolong@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago

Oh agreed! I'm rereading Dune right now to refresh my memory before the movie later this year and I love the characters, but at the same time I understand where the criticism comes from.

I don't think it's a translation problem; the second book has a different translator and if anything, the characters are even less realistic.

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