It's been a month that went by rather quickly. For a variety of reasons. There was a distinct feeling of drowning in work and sundry other things that tend to pile up slowly while one is not noticing till it all feels like a bit too much. So the holiday was timely. And very much appreciated!
Direct flights to a very popular destination for Norwegians were made good use of and a very relaxed and warm week in Gran Canaria ensued! I'd never really been to that part of the world before. In fact the closest I'd come would have been sailing out from the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. Which is not that close really.
We were staying on the south coast in a relatively quite part of the island, which was really nice. Good weather, great food, nice beaches and warmer pools :D. And to top it all off some of the family from the UK had made it over as well, so great company too!
I was particularly impressed by the variety in the beaches, rocks and boulders littering some, nice sand in others. And, in the case of the famous Playa del Maspalomas, quite an impressive expanse of sand dunes! The water felt a bit too cold for me to actually go for a swim though. Especially given those heated pools :).
Special mention has to be made of the hike to a hill top not too far away from where we were staying that Google Maps provides the name of in Norwegian :). The views were great too! Another highlight was the day spent on the slides at Aqualand north of Maspalomas! A bit of an active end to an otherwise very relaxed trip.
An upshot of the nearly six-hour long flight to Las Palmas, as well as the relaxed nature of the holiday meant that I managed to finish off the final book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. In short, there's a lot to take in with this series. Light reading it is not. There definitely was a lot of hard science, yet, as with all good writers, the science wasn't allowed to get in the way of the story. At least for me. There was also a lot of food for thought.
There are so many different threads to my feelings about these books though. It's quite hard to unpack it all, but I'm going to try anyway. Hopefully without too many spoilers, but please beware, there might be some.
One very interesting thing was how the original Chinese story surfaced in different ways at different points in the books. In many ways the first book The Three Body Problem, partly being set mostly in China and also with its heavy referencing of the cultural revolution at the very beginning makes this quite obvious. The latter two books, The Dark Forest and Death's End are progressively less and less tied to Chinese territory physically and yet the narrative is rich with a lot of social and cultural references.
One interesting thing I noticed was that two different translators have worked on the three volumes. One who did the first and last and another did the middle one. I'm not sure why, but I was much more comfortable reading the two volumes translated by Ken Liu than the one by Joel Martinson. Whether it was a different way of writing or just how the translation was being done... Or even the fact that The Dark Forest transitions from Earth to Space, so to speak.
(Interestingly enough, this week I found out that a friend had read the series, also in English, and had had the exact opposite experience. Although, he hadn't even realized that there were two different translators involved!)
As for the story itself, Liu Cixin definitely weaves a mesmerizing set of ideas together masterfully. A philosophy of civilizations seen through a prism I couldn't necessarily identify with myself, but one that was nonetheless fascinating to explore. The whole Dark Forest idea itself is a mind bender. And then there are the dimensional tricks which ultimately lead to the unspooling/zooming out of the timeline that left me rather breathless at the very end!
There was also an almost deliberate casualness with which protagonists were treated which I felt somewhat unsettled by. Appearing, disappearing, appearing again. In many ways this was particularly pronounced in Death's End since in the other two books one more or less follows a single protagonist.
To be fair, the same is also largely true with Death's End, but somehow the darting, speeding timeline made it harder for me to connect with Cheng Xin than it was with Luo Ji in The Dark Forest or Wang Miao in The Three Body Problem. I suppose there are also others, so one could argue if these three were indeed the primary protagonists at all. Maybe they were merely faces of humanity as it traversed the story. In many ways my favourite character was probably Da Shi anyway :).
So yeah. Happy that I read all the books. Probably never going to read them again (which means getting them from the library worked out quite well). Very different from anything I've read before. There are, nevertheless, echoes of some of the ideas in this series that I feel I've come across elsewhere, and probably will again.
It was such a huge contrast starting Rejoice after Death's End that I actually had to take it easy for a few days. Just let all my swirling thoughts and feelings from Remembrance.. settle a bit :). Now that I'm properly getting into Steven Erikson's sci-fi though, I have to say it feels more like philosophy and satire wrapped in a thin layer of science. I guess probably best to give the man the final couple of hundred pages before jumping to too many conclusions, he is my favourite fantasy author after all :).
Of course, in a constant undercurrent to life, the war goes on. Each day I feel a little more used to it, which makes me feel a little more terrified. The missile strike that interrupted the Saudi GP though was a reminder that this is not the only one.
(Very very happy that Ferrari are doing well, by the way. Finally! Long may it continue. I'm not even going to say anything about Liverpool.)
