V- When you read space opera and hard sci-fi back-to-back

I finished reading Arkady Maxine’s A Memory Called Empire not too long ago, and just today finished The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Both science fiction, but two VERY different manifestations of it.

(This won’t be a comprehensive review of either book. Review writing is not really my thing.)

I liked both books. Well, “liked” with caveats.

A Memory Called Empire is stuffed to the gills with strange, multi-syllable names, places, and terms, which, in principle, I don’t mind in an SFF book, but having to stop every couple sentences to sound something out gets…tedious, even when I’m otherwise enjoying the book. My brain does not easily parse long words, so when it encounters terms like “Teixcalaanlitzlim,” it just kinda starts making error noises. (It took three quarters of the book before I could read that without mentally stumbling over it).

The Three Body Problem was…dare I say it, maybe a little too smart for me? It plays with a lot of ideas I’m interested in—Fermi’s paradox, astronomy, quantum physics—but it plays from the point of view of someone who intimately understands the math. Math and I are not friends. I understood just enough to follow the story, which I count as a major point in this book’s favor—it is remarkably accessible, given the subject matter. It does take its sweet, sweet time getting to the sci-fi bits. Like, between the 10% and 40% mark, I had no idea where the story was going and was questioning whether this even was sci-fi. I don’t always love genre blending, personally—if a character is experiencing hallucinations, I kinda like to know ahead of time if magic/ faeries/ ghosts/ aliens/ mind control are on the table as explanations—but I know so little about Chinese history and politics from the 1960’s that even the non sci-fi context setting was interesting enough to keep me reading.

One of these books rekindled some of my desire to write a space opera. The other convinced me that I never, ever want to write hard sci-fi.

Both are useful to know about oneself.