this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Sci-Fi is fantastic. Of course there have been authors in China imagining the future since forever.
The Three Body Problem was an interesting book, and the series as a whole explores the Dark Forest theory really well.
But Cixian Liu pushed some weird stuff when it comes to gender. In the books, the entire male gender becomes "feminized" due to prolonged peace time, and this apparently makes humanity in aggregate docile, to the point that they make the "mistake" of electing a woman into a position of power that she won't be able to handle. Because she's a woman. The book makes it very clear that what is needed, is a man, not that simply this one woman is the wrong person for the job.
The entire series ends on a man absolving this same woman of responsibility for dooming humanity, he literally mansplains to her how because she's a woman, it can't be her fault. She can't blame herself for being incapable of doing what a man could have.
Very good sci-fi. But the plot gets weird and uncomfortable.
Edit: typo, book instead of books, making it seem like I'm referring to plotlines in the first book, when I'm in fact referring to stuff in the second, and the trilogy in general.
wow... that book was published in 2008?
the stuff your describing... I'd expect in some off-beat 1950's scifi, or something.
Weird. (Not to say that we're perfect, but, yeah. the casual sexism in Asimov's was... jarring. I didn't remember from when I last read it... which to be fair was in middle school.)
Asimov's women characters still had the ingredients of people, and were allowed independent agency. They could present both problems and solutions in the plot, etc. Yes, at worst it could be bad, but he wrote women in plenty of different lights.
For the time, he often put women characters in fairly progressive roles, even.
Meanwhile, the only time Cixian Liu allows a woman character to make decisions, is when he needs something to go wrong for the plot.
I mean, I'm not being overly critical of Asimov. he's largely a product of his time. (you can see similar attitudes with nuclear weapons and radiation. Hell, he wax's poetically about bathing in the stuff. the 'warm glow' he describes is actually literal... humans can perceive Xrays, after a fashion..)
I just think it's a jarring contrast to a modern scifi. but then, also, I had to put Daemon by Daniel Suarez down, with disappointment in a friend that recommend it.
Yeah, I just meant to say that Cixian Liu pulls some stuff that I would think out of place even in Asimov's time.
The only memorable "female" character that I can remember going outside what seems Liu's preconceptions about women, is the alien murder-despot-robot controlled by the aliens.
ooo boi... sexy alien murder bots?
isn't that like... a requirement for pulp scifi? (Dammit now I have to go read Murderbot again. the snark spoke to me.)
Now that's a fun series! I hope we get more.
Second/Third book spoilers
Yeah so in the story the aliens pretend to want peace when humanity manages to get things into a standoff-situation.The aliens are still en route to earth, so to give them an ambassador of sorts, a female humanoid android is built for them to control remotely.
However the second the standoff is resolved, the aliens take over the planet, and she is put in charge of earth. Her first order of business is to start wielding a katana with reckless abandon, followed by limiting living area and food supply to the point that only a fraction of the current human population can be supported, and then announces "guess some of y'all will starve, now fight each for food, you insects".
Sci-fi carried that weird male superiority thing well into the late 80s, that's part of what put me off the entire genre when I was younger. It was incredibly difficult for women to break into the sci-fi boys club until the 90s or so, the shift happened around the same time as the x-files caught on.
I managed to get through the first book but it was embedded cultural mores like that that made it tough going for me. That’s probably a shortcoming in me more than any fault of the book—science fiction should take you to places that challenge you—but it wasn’t worth it for me personally.
The story explores some very intriguing concepts, (ftl travel, multi-dimensional space, dark forest theory, technological explosions, planck-tech, the list goes on) but I had the same problem. I listened to the audio book, so I had the benefit of mentally tuning in and out as the story waxed and waned.
The second book especially had something which really annoyed me. Mister main character has to save the world but he doesn't wanna so the government tells him he can have whatever he wants so he asks for the perfect woman.
And then they just give him that? Her entire character is just that she's perfect and loves him and apparently that's real, she's not pretending? The fuck? The story almost instantly jumps to them having children and I was reeling because holy fuck I have never seen a female character be so thinly presented and objectified. She's literally payment for main charachter man to do what the government wants.
Then when they need to control MC boy again, they do it by taking this girl away from him. She's literally treated like a "thing" that can be taken and given. Whose love can be switched on on demand, and whose free will/wishes automatically matches whatever the men around her/plot demands.
I can't remember any of that...
The first book has barely any of the weird stuff. It's a slow burn and by far my favorite. Did you read the full trilogy? The second book is where the plot goes off the deep end, and the third is bonkers.
I could get into specifics but I'd have too look up chapters and sentences to quote, charachter names etc.
And as I said, the exploration of actual sci-fi concepts is solid right up to the end.
The first tome left the strongest impression on me as well. Although I remember in some detail the whole part in space with the solar system collapsing into 2 dimensions, and that's near the end. Some of these ideas were crazy cool. Thanks for letting me know about the not so neat stuff
Oh I agree, if you only look at the sci-fi stuff, the books get into tons of shit that is cool as hell.
Yes, but that was a few years ago. The scifi may have occluded the weird stuff, I guess. I wasn't so observant of the representation of women either back then, so it may totally have flown over my head
It's fairly on the nose, if you zoom out a bit and look at the plot at arms length.
You might remember that after the female lead character hibernates into the future. She's wondering where all the men are, until someone explains that men have become "feminized" to the point that they are as "frail" and "beautiful" as women. The reason given is the prolonged period of prosperity making "real" men unneeded and unattractive, which is fucking stupid.
The plot makes a point out of claiming that women lack the "ugly" parts of man making them the better half of humanity, but at the same time that those same parts are what are needed to be a pivotal person who can maintain an interstellar stalemate to save the human species.
It's basically three books worth of words that on gender boil down to men being doers and women being lookers, and that whenever either tries to step out of their role, things go wrong.
Men only being valued for what they can do, and women only being valued for how they look, is classic sexism.