Modern Society Archives - Page 8 of 21

Capturing Castles with Jane and Charlotte

Apparently, I just joined a cult.

“Once you read it, you fall in love with it, and from then on you’re part of a secret club, self-selecting and wildly enthusiastic.” That is what Constance Grady said in Vox.

At least my new cult has some distinguished members! J.K Rowling: “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I’ve ever met.” Erica Jong: “A delicious, compulsively readable novel.”

The novel is I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. It was recommended to me by one of my former students, who did not warn me she was luring me into a cult. (Tsk, tsk, Mallory.) You, Dear Reader, are hereby warned. Read at our own peril. (If you have already read the novel, then we can go off together and dye our clothes green while listening to Debussy or something like that.)

My glance round the internet reveals an unusual consensus. This is Smith’s best novel, but it is not even remotely her most well-known. She also wrote 101 Dalmatians, which thanks to a certain media conglomerate gets all the attention. Then again, I would guess that many people (like me) know the movie well, but never once wondered if there was a book back there somewhere behind the story of Pongo and Perdy.

There is a dog in I Capture the Castle, but that is totally irrelevant to the story. This is a story about people. At the outset of the story, we find the Mortmains living in a thoroughly decrepit English castle. They are supposed to be paying rent to live there, but fortunately their landlord never bothers to care that no rent is paid. The father is a famous novelist, whole sole novel is a sort of proto-Ulysses, an incomprehensible modernist tome beloved by people who like to pretend that they like that sort of thing. He wrote it a long time ago and never managed a second book. His second wife is a model. His two daughters and one son complete the family. And there is the nice, rather handsome lad who helps out with the chores. The book is the diary of the middle child, Cassandra.

Soon after the novel starts, the owner of the castle meets an untimely end and the new owners show up. They are…surprise, surprise…two young, wealthy, and quite eligible bachelors. Fill in the plot.

The key to the whole book shows up in the second diary entry. Cassandra is talking with her older sister, Rose, one evening.

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel.” [said Rose]
I said I’d rather be in a Charlotte Bronte.
“Which would be nicest—Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”
This is the kind of discussion I like very much but I wanted to get on with my journal, so I just said: “Fifty percent each way would be perfect,” and started to write determinedly.

If you read that passage and you thought, “I simply must read this book,” you will soon join us in the cult. If you read that passage and thought, What utterly maudlin rubbish,” well…

(By the way, the correct answer to Rose’s thought experiment is “Jane with zero Charlotte,” and while I would love to have that discussion with you right now, I must get on with this blog post.)

The book has charm, no doubt. But, there is also a tremendously interesting reflection on the love of Jane and Charlotte. The castle in the title is the decaying remnant of yesteryear in which Cassandra lives in the mid-20^th century. Looking around her home, the only sign that it is the 20^th century is that it would take a long time for a castle to reach this state of disrepair.

Living like that, you might assume that Cassandra would like to join the 20^th century, with one of those fancy new houses with things like indoor plumbing and electricity. Instead, Jane and Charlotte are her lodestars. Cassandra’s diary reads like something an Austen heroine would write. Two wealthy eligible bachelors show up. Cassandra is right there with you in writing the rest of the story. The title gives away the end of the story, but honestly was any other end possible? The castle is life in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra captures the castle.

There really should be a name for the category of books that create worlds in which the readers desperately want to live. Austen, Bronte, and, of course, Rowling. Any others? I have never heard anyone sigh wistfully at how nice it would be to live in the worlds of Homer or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Faulkner.

The biggest wonder of I Capture the Castle is that I only recently learned of its existence. I cannot imagine that anyone who loves Austen or Bronte would fail to enjoy this book.

Fortunately, the Milk

There are these days, and to be honest it has always been thus, people who are firmly convinced that the world is becoming a worse place. There are people who believe that the children born in the years to come are being born into an impoverished world, that it would have been better to have been born in the past.

Those people have not read Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman. The book, published in 2013, came into this world long past the date at which I could have read it to my children. This is sad. Very sad. I would have liked to have read this book to my children. They would have liked to have had me read to them. But, they were born too soon. Children in the future have it better.

It is a simple tale. Mom leaves town, and when the kids wake up, there is no milk in the house, so Dad goes to get the milk, and he doesn’t come back for a rather long time (long time in kid terms—in adult terms, maybe an hour). When he returns, the bored children ask what took him so long. So, Dad explains…and that is the story.

You see, Dad went right to the store to get the milk, and on his way back he was abducted by aliens, from whom he escaped only to be captured by pirates, from whom he also escaped when he was rescued by a stegosaurus named Steg in a hot-air balloon and they end up…well, the story has a volcano god, piranhas, wumpires and more. It is a rollicking tale, full of dastardly villains and heroic heroes and danger and escape and lots and lots and lots of oddities. Do not be anxious. Fortunately, the Milk is not lost. (Should I have included a spoiler alert for the fact that Fortunately, the Milk was not lost?)

This is a story you want to read aloud and make up fantastic voices for all the characters and raise and lower the volume of your voice as danger looms and subsides. This is the story in which you want gasp aloud when horror strikes and then look utterly relieved when horror is avoided. If you read it with enough gusto, you would have a marvelous time. It is a book, in other words, made for Dads who like to read books aloud and engage in over-the-top dramatic amateur theatrics.

It is a fun book. Sadly, my children were too old…

As if that wasn’t enough to make you want to read this book to your kids, Dear Reader, there is more. After you read this book, you get to have some really fascinating philosophical discussion with the Listeners.

First, you can wrestle with the Time Travel parts. (Of course there is Time Travel! How could a book like this Not have Time Travel?) As the Steg explains to the wumpires, “We are on an important mission I am trying to get back to the present. My assistant [aka Dad] is trying to get home to the future for breakfast.” Does the sentence “I am trying to get back to the present” makes logical sense? If you have never had a discussion about the nature of time with an 8 year old, then this book gives you the wonderful opportunity for a marvelous conversation.

There is in addition a time loop. (Of course there is a Time Loop. How could there Not be a Time Loop?) Future Dad helps Present Dad (who is currently in the past) out of a really bad situation. You see, Present Dad lost the Milk (insert sounds of horror), but Future Dad was able to go back in time to grab the milk that Present Dad lost and return it to him, which means there can now be two milks, both Present milk and Future milk. As if that is not enough looping goodness, after discovering that milk from one time can be brought into another time, Even-Farther-in-the-Future Dad reaches back in time to get the milk from what is then Past Dad and voila, there are now two of the same milks existing at the same time! (Don’t worry, Future Dad sends the past milk back into the past before the universe is destroyed.) Now ask that 8 year old Listener to explain how all this works.

Once you are done with all this marvelous discussion of Time, you can move on to discussing necessary and sufficient conditions. (Insert sounds of Great Joy!) After Dad has finished his tale explaining why it took him so long to get home, the kids express skepticism. For some strange reason they do not believe that all of these things happened to Dad as he was trying to come home with the Milk. Dad is not disturbed at all by their doubts, because he can prove his story is true. “How?” ask the kids. Dad reaches into his pocket and produces the Milk.

Does this prove Dad’s story is true? After all, if the story was true then Dad would have the milk in his pocket when he came through the door. If he didn’t have the milk, the story would be false. But, he has the milk. So, that is proof, right? Now spend a good long time insisting that the existence of the milk proves the story is true while the young listeners work out the difference between a necessary condition (if the story is true, then there necessarily must be must be milk in Dad’s pocket) and a sufficient condition (if there is milk in Dad’s pocket, then that is sufficient to establish that the story must be true).

Want more philosophical discussions? There is a fascinating rumination on nomenclature. Steg refers to objects in what seems like an unconventional manner. Steg’s “hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers” are what Dad calls “coconuts.” Steg rides in his “Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier” powered by “special shiny-bluey-stones.” The fact that Dad has different names raises an interesting question: who gets to name things? Steg was around long before Dad, after all. Doesn’t Steg have the right to name things? (Who, by the way, got to name the Listener to whom you are reading the story?)

There are also fascinating culinary matters: why exactly can you not put orange juice on your breakfast cereal?

This is a story which can be read again and again, and after each reading, yet more marvelous discussions will ensue. To help you in your rereading pleasure, the book also has a curious publication decision. The book was published in Britain and America by different publishers. The book is filled with illustrations, which help the story roll along in its marvelously inventive way. But, the illustrations are not the same in the British and American versions. Indeed, not even the illustrator is the same. Skottie Young did the American version; Chris Riddell did the British version. The illustrations are not even remotely the same; completely different style. So, after reading one version multiple times, you can get the other version and start a whole new debate on which set of illustrations is better and how the story is affected by the new set of illustrations. (Plus, with new illustrations, you can invent new voices!).

Sometimes, books are pure fun. This is one of those books.

Don’t Bother to Pick-Up

When you pick up a Library of America volume, you naturally enough expect the material within to be the best of American Letters. That is, after all, the whole point of this non-profit publication company. The physical quality of the books is as good as it gets and the books themselves are full of the best that has been written by Americans.

Take Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, nicely paired with Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. These are not detective stories; these are stories of criminals. For the most part, it is obvious why the particular novels are included in these collections. After reading the six novels in the first volume and two of the five novels in the second, I had no hesitation in saying that these really are amazing examples of the type of gritty noir you would expect to read in a cheap paperback edition in the mid-20^th century.

Then I got to Pick-Up, by Charles Willeford, originally published in 1955. Don’t be alarmed that you have never heard of this novel. Sure, it is one of five novels selected to be in the Library of America volume of Crime Novels from the decade of the 1950s. That makes you think it is a really big important novel. But, here is a shocking bit: when you go to look up the novel on Wikipedia, it does not have a page. That’s right. Nobody has bothered to create a Wikipedia page on one of the five novels included in this Library of America collection. Charles Willeford has a Wikipedia page. Some of his other novels have Wikipedia pages. But, this novel does not. Then you go to Amazon and find several Willeford novels still in print with publishers seeking a profit. But not this one. The only way to get this novel is from the Library of America.

OK, so maybe this is a forgotten gem. Maybe the Library of America is bringing a great novel back from oblivion. So you set out to read it. And what do you find?

Harry, the narrator, meets Helen when she wanders into a diner where he is working. Harry and Helen set out on a torrid affair. Helen just ran away from home. Harry is living in a run-down apartment, floating from job to job. He quits his job at the diner and Helen moves in with him and they live on alcohol and love until the money runs out. Harry decides he should get another job, but when he heads off for work, Helen ends up in bars drinking with other men. So, clearly Harry can’t go to work. What to do? Obvious: a suicide pact. Which fails. So they head off to the hospital to get psychiatric help. Which fails. So, here we have a couple of alcoholic losers who can’t grasp that maybe they ought to think about their lives three days into the future.

Helen got out of bed, slid her arms around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You shouldn’t have to work, Harry,” she said sincerely and impractically.

Eventually they get around to making another suicide pact. Harry strangles Helen and then turns on the gas to kill himself. But, darn it, he left the transom widow open, so he didn’t die. That’s OK. He killed Helen after all, so he will get the death penalty. Off to jail. Wait! Coroner’s report comes back and Helen died of natural causes before Harry strangling her had a chance to kill her. Harry is set free (apparently if someone has a heart attack while you are strangling them, you are totally innocent.) He heads back to his old apartment to collect his stuff.

And we are now three paragraphs from the end of the novel. Riveting? Hardly? Willeford writes in a sort of flat prose so the story moves along quickly enough. But, this isn’t Chandler or Hammett or any other master of noir prose. Moreover, at no point do you feel the least bit of sympathy for Harry and Helen. Well, if you do feel sympathy for them, then you are the type who just feels sympathy for everyone at all times. There is nothing particularly sympathetic about Harry and Helen. Oh, and remember this is in an anthology called Crime Novels; where is the Crime? Harry’s attempt to kill Helen in a double suicide pact which turned out not be a crime after all. There is no crime here. Just a couple of losers floating through life.

How did this otherwise entirely forgettable novel rise up out of the obscurity into which it had fallen and get included as one of the Big 5 of American Noir in the 1950s? It had to be because the editor, Robert Polito, thought the last three paragraphs were stunningly great, that they turned this novel from a humdrum decent way to pass the time into something that needed to be preserved for all time. Those last three paragraphs:

I walked down the steps to the street and into the rain. A wind came up and the rain slanted sideways, coming down at an angle of almost thirty degrees. Two blocks away I got under the awning of a drug store. It wasn’t letting up any; if anything, it was coming down harder. I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain.
Just a tall, lonely Negro.
Walking in the rain.

It is really only the penultimate paragraph, five words long, that matters. Until that moment, Harry never mentioned his race.

OK, so what? This is where the novel get truly puzzling. Willeford wrote this whole novel and then at the very end tells you that Harry is black. What was he trying to convey in that moment? What reaction was he expecting or desiring the reader to have? I can think of several possibilities.

1. He wanted readers to realize that they are racists. Here they are reading a noir novel and assuming the narrator is white, but he is really black. Skimming through assorted recent online reviews of this novel (most of which torture themselves to avoid revealing the “Just a tall, lonely Negro” end), this is the preferred assumed message. All those racists in the 1950s would have to face their racism in assuming that the hero of the book was white, when the hero is really black. This must have forced all those terrible people in the 1950s to rethink their racist presumptions.

But, there is a problem with that narrative. While Harry is indeed the narrator, he is hardly heroic. He is an alcoholic loser. It is hard to see how it is a sign of racist attitudes to assume that this good-for-nothing suicidal attempted murderer is white. Is it racist to assume that the pathetic loser in a novel is white? If confronting racial attitudes is the point, then wouldn’t this book confirm racist stereotypes? “Gosh, I assumed this terrible person was white, but he is really black” is hardly what we now consider an expression of racial sensitivity.

2. So, maybe Willeford was trying to do something different. Maybe he is trying to make you think the novel is deeper than it actually is. There are many episodes in the book which could be read differently if one is inclined to think differently about Harry depending on his race. Three examples.

a) At one point Harry and Helen are in a bar and some drunks in the bar take exception to the fact that Harry and Helen are together and try to muscle in and take Helen away from Harry. If Harry is white, this is easily explained; as the novel makes very clear, Helen is incredibly attractive, while Harry is not. So, the drunks just want the hot girl to be with them instead of with this pathetic loser. If Harry is black, then the drunks are objecting to this black guy being with this white woman.

b) Helen’s mother shows up in the middle of the novel, trying to convince her daughter to come home. Helen refuses. So, Helen’s mother, seeing the squalor in which they are living, decides to send them $25 a week as long as they promise never to come back to Helen’s hometown. If Harry is white, this is because Helen’s mother is embarrassed that her daughter is with a total loser. If Harry is black, this is because Helen’s mother objects to the interracial relationship.

c) When Harry is in prison he has to meet with a psychologist. The psychologist starts grilling Harry about his sex life, starting when he was a child. The psychologist is rather pushy about all this; Harry get mad that the psychologist is so obsessive about his sex life. If Harry is white, this is an example of a Freudian State Psychologist who sees everyone through the lens of their sexual lives. If Harry is black, this is because the psychologist has racist assumptions about the sex lives of black children.

That list could be expanded pretty easily. So, what is the message of the book? Is the reader supposed to realize that all these episodes which were perfectly understandable when Harry was presumed to be white were actually misunderstood? Is this proof of the omnipresence of racism? It is hard to see how it could be that. Every single episode which you can chalk up to racism once you know Harry is black was perfectly explainable when Harry was white. So, if you can explain the episode without knowing Harry’s race, then can you turn around as say that this is a story about the effects of racism?

3. Was Willeford trying to show that there really isn’t a difference between blacks and whites? Was he trying to show that the race of the narrator is irrelevant to the story? It is hard to justify that explanation too given the way the ending was constructed. Willeford was clearly trying to shock the reader.

I am running out of ideas here. My personal reaction to that ending was “Oh, so that is why this rather pedestrian novel is in the Library of America volume.” I then figured it must have sent shock waves through the land when it was published in 1955, only to discover the aforementioned total lack of any interest in the book at all.

You can file this essay under “Books you now don’t have to bother to read.” And for all those other contemporary reviewers out there who think the book is a vehicle for the modern racial sensibilities, think about it a bit more. Just because the author drops in a five line paragraph about race at the end of the book does not mean the book validates your racial preconceptions about people in the 1950s.

Wokeness at Noon

Are you Woke? It was not too long ago that such a question would have been greeted with a puzzled disdain for its grammatical barbarism. It is now the question of the moment, no longer limited to college campuses as part of the initiation rites to higher learning. In certain political circles, it has already become the code word for being taken seriously on policy questions.

The puzzling thing about Wokeness is not that it is fashionable among a small subset of the Campus Left. One should never be surprised by what is fashionable among college faculty and students. The curious question is how these ideas broke out of the academic asylum and met acquiescence among a large group of people who should have known better.

The answer is found in a book which should have never fallen off the radar: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First published in 1941, it was—along with 1984—one of the great books about totalitarianism written in the 1940s. Widely praised when it was published, the book was enormously influential in fostering the consensus view of post-war anti-communism. In 1998, Modern Library published a list of the 100 best English novels of the 20th century; Darkness at Noon was ranked eighth, five places above 1984.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

I Know What You Did Next Summer

Do you have the right to commit a crime? Odd question, to be sure. One would not think there is much to discuss.

Yet, Philip K. Dick, spun it into a nice story. “Minority Report.”

First things first, let’s set aside the “Living in an Unjust Society” discussion. Whether you have the right to violate unjust laws is itself an interesting discussion topic. For now, let’s focus on more mundane crimes. For example: Do you have the right to murder your neighbor because you don’t like him? That seems like a really easy question to answer.

In the world of “Minority Report,” society has managed to eliminate all such crime by the simple expedient of arresting people before they commit the crimes. Accused of precrime, you will be incarcerated before you actually murder your neighbor. Best of both worlds, right? Your neighbor lives and you are punished for the fact that you would have killed him had society not arrested you before you did so.

The idea of punishments for precrime sends a chill down everyone’s spine—with one exception. Most people are quite happy with the idea of arresting people for plotting to commit a terrorist attack. In that case however, we could describe the crime as plotting to do something. What about arresting people for the precrime that they were going to plot a terrorist attack in the future? Can we arrest people before they actually start plotting? Can we arrest them before they have even thought about joining the plot?

The problem with precrime that you instantly realized is that it seems impossible to know that someone is going to commit a crime in the future. Sure, you may know that someone is violent and hates his neighbor, but is that the same thing as knowing that the neighbor is about to be murdered? Of course not.

The world of “Minority Report” has people who are born with the ability to see the future. Dubbed “precogs,” they are used by the Precrime Division to alert the police that a crime is going to be committed. The police then sweep in and arrest the person before the crime happens. Crime vanishes. Everyone is happy.

Imagine living in that world for a moment. Imagine there was a zero percent chance that any crime would be committed ever again. You can go anywhere you want, never lock your house or your car, and even leave your laptop on the ground next to a park bench and come back later and pick it up. Perfect safety all the time. Sounds nice, right?

It is indeed nice, until you get accused of a precrime. You can protest all you want that you didn’t commit a crime. That is, after all the point. Of course you didn’t commit a crime. You were arrested before you did so. Good luck proving your innocence; how do you prove you would not have committed a crime if you had not been arrested?

“Minority Report” goes one step further. Precogs do not all have simultaneous revelations of the future. So, there are three of them attached to the Precrime Division. An arrest is only made when two of them alert the authorities about an impeding crime. That feature creates the potential for a fascinating puzzle.

Suppose Precog 1 foresees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. Charlie had no idea that he would ever even think about killing Bob. Charlie is alerted to Precog 1’s knowledge of the impending murder, so Charlie immediately decides to leave town so that there is no chance that he will kill Bob. After all, Precog’s 1’s statement about the future does not prevent Charlie from leaving town to make it impossible for the statement to become true.

Precog 2 now sees the future and predicts that Charlie will not kill Bob. After all, since they will be in different places, there is no way for Charlie to kill Bob. Charlie then learns that Precog 2 has seen that he will not kill Bob. This is great news. Since Charlie won’t kill Bob, there is no longer a need to leave town. After all, if Charlie was really going to kill Bob, then Precog 2 would have foreseen it.

Now that Charlie no longer needs to leave town, Precog 3 comes along and sees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. So, two of the three precogs have now seen that Charlie will kill Bob on Tuesday, and Charlie is arrested.

The questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Can we legitimately say that any of the precogs have actually seen the future when the future can change depending on Charlie’s decision about whether or not to leave town?
3. Did Precog 1 and Precog 3 actually see the same future?

All of those questions are nice little puzzles set up by the story, but you probably did not have a very difficult time answering any of those questions. Why not? You believe in human agency. You believe that Charlie really does have a decision about whether to kill Bob or not, and that up until the moment of the murder, Charlie could decide not to do so. Because Charlie can decide not to murder Bob, it seems unjust to arrest Charlie for precrime based on some precog’s vision of an unsettled future. Indeed, you think of the world of “Minority Report” as a dystopia. Sure, there is no crime, but the cost to liberty of eliminating that crime is simply too high.

Now, make the problem harder. The reason you don’t like the world of “Minority Report” is because you do not believe your future actions are predetermined. As of now, the future is still not predictable by humans: we do not know the mind of God and we do not have the ability to track all the chemical reactions which will occur in every brain on the planet. So, even if the future is potentially predictable, we cannot do so now. But, what if that changed? Just for a moment, imagine that the future is predictable. What if we could know that if Charlie is not arrested first, he will kill Bob next Tuesday? Absolute certainty; no margin for error at all. Now, can we arrest Charlie for the pre-crime of killing Bob in the future?

Saying “yes” seems wrong. We still have that same aversion to arresting Charlie before he has actually killed Bob. But, saying “No” means that we are consenting to the death of Bob simply because we are too squeamish to arrest Charlie before it happens. Does Charlie have the right to murder Bob before we can arrest Charlie? Do you have the right to commit a crime?

In a world in which the future was perfectly predictable, arresting someone for precrime seems like a moral obligation. Surely it is wrong to stand by and let Bob be murdered if we know with absolute certainty that he will be murdered. On the flip side, if we do not know that Bob will be murdered, it is surely wrong to arrest Charlie because we think he might murder Bob. But, where is the point at which this flips? Is it only in cases of perfect certainty that we are willing to arrest Charlie before he kills Bob? What if we are 99.999% certain that Charlie is going to kill Bob unless we arrest him? Does Charlie have the right to kill Bob because there is a 0.001% chance he won’t do it?

These sorts of puzzles about statistical probability are all around us, by the way. We literally could not act in society without forming guesses about what people might do in the future. “Minority Report” may seem like a pleasant story to read about the problems in a fictional dystopia, but sorting out what precisely is right or wrong in this story has intriguing implications for a whole host of problems in the world both now and in the near future. As the ability to sort through Big Data rises, as you volunteer an endless array of information about your life to Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple, your future is getting a lot more predictable.

Cixin Liu Joins the Pantheon

In its relatively short history, science fiction has had a fair number of books which could be considered Classics, books that are so interesting in what they do, it is reasonably certain that people will still be reading them in the future. Take Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, for example. The idea of imagining what would happen if the laws of social science were as stable as the laws of physical science and then going forward through time was clever; the stories were well done and reasonably well-written, and the books were fun.

There is a new trilogy in town that is every bit as good as Asimov’s trilogy. I don’t know any higher praise than that for a work in science fiction.

Cixin Liu’s The Remembrance of Earth’s Past is brilliant. If you have even a nodding like of science fiction, you’ll want to read this.

There is one annoying problem however. The trilogy is formally called The Remembrance of Earth’s Past, but it is often called The Three-Body Problem Trilogy, since that is the name of the first book. An interesting question of nomenclature; if the author has one name for his trilogy, but popular discussion of it uses a different name, which name wins out in the end? The publisher is already stuck; there is a nice slip cover edition of the trilogy and the slip cover uses the popular name, not the actual name.

What makes this book so great? Therein lies another problem. Part of the joy of reading these books is watching the story unfold. This series has more twists and turns than any work I have read in a very long time. The more you know about the plot in advance, the less surprising and wonderful it all would be. If you know nothing about the plot, do your best to keep it that way as you venture into the world Liu has crafted.

What will you find? Here is one way of describing it which does not give away plot developments. After reading this trilogy, for the first time in my life I have a reasonable definition of “science fiction.” Science fiction at its best creates a plausible word in which the mechanics of that world bring philosophical problems into a new light.

The best science fiction is a novel and interesting way to do that; most science fiction is terribly derivative. What is incredible about The Three-Body Problem trilogy is that it manages to create a new world and a new philosophical problem every couple of hundred pages. Just when you think you have settled into the world and are wrestling with the problems inherent in that world, you realize that the world has morphed and the problems you thought you were solving were not the real problems to be solved.

This wouldn’t work if every morphing of the world felt like a simple restart—it would seem like a series of unrelated short stories then. But, in this work, the world seems to morph organically—of course this world is morphing into this next world and the philosophical problems are obviously really the ones you are now facing. In other words, the trilogy just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

Moreover, the development of the world arises from constant thinking about the laws of physics. This is the rare since fiction work in which the science part and the philosophical musing part are both vital to the structure of the plot.

Just as the science underlying the book develops naturally, the philosophical questions the book raises throughout are related. It is an exploration of the individual and society. At no point is it really obvious that is what is going on, though. I only realized it when I started thinking about the trilogy after finishing it.

Lest this review seem like unbridled praise, I can note that the prose style could use some work. The book was originally written in Chinese, so the problem may be entirely in the translation. But, there are moments of ridiculously ham-handed style that will make you cringe a bit. Just ignore them and move along. The story is worth it. And, don’t even be tempted to look at the explanatory footnotes in the first volume. The translator decided that you really do need to have all the references to Chinese history and politics explained to you in footnotes which are totally irrelevant to understanding the story and totally incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t underhand the reference already.

Let’s not end on the sour note, however. This is a long work. The volumes are 390, 512, and 610 pages long. All together that is longer than War and Peace, but, then again, the scope of this work rivals the scope of Tolstoy’s magnum opus. The Three-Body Problem is likely not a Great Book, but it will have a very long shelf life. Set off on the journey; you’ll be glad you did.