Reading Wednesday

[naath]

Reading: the Dark Forest (still). Now I'm about 80% through I can say that I'm enjoying it, I haven't noticed the difference-in-translation (other people might, I'm a bit rubbish at that sort of thing), it's quite dense reading (probably because I'm bad at understanding Chinese writing, even in English, especially I'm bad at Chinese names) and not going super fast. Story progresses, female characters remain sadly not very present, science continues entirely made up.

I suspect I will drag this one out until Ancillary Mercy is out, but if I don't I have a pile of other stuff to read...

Comments

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was a bit of a shame that after Ye Wenjie and Yang Dong were central, vivid female presences in the first book, there's nobody comparable in the second. (Although Ye Wenjie acts as a rare female example of a sage offering a few words of cryptic plot-driving brilliance - although it's not entirely clear how she obtained said insight).

The science was at least plausibly made up - if we can't use the sun as a signal amplifier, it's at least not a ridiculous idea given all the weird things we *can* do. I also liked the way three hundred years of innovation without particle physics gives something we can imagine as a high-tech future (flying cars, every surface usable as a screen) while breakthroughs in fundamental physics gives something indistinguishable from magic.