The Future by Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster]

The Fall of Hong Kong sends young Lai Zhen to a refugee camp and on to the U.S. where she grows up to become an internet influencer whose specialty is survivalism. Martha Einkorn is a refugee from a religious cult who now works closely with an internet mogul whose mission is world domination. Lenk Sketlish is one of the three most powerful people on the planet, all of whom are determined to destroy what exists and start over from scratch.

Welcome to a world of hidden bunkers, womb-like suits constructed to provide every human need, and a special surveillance program that guarantees personal safety, even during an apocalypse. Religion, myth, and the ultimate in human greed all unite in a novel whose threads are intricate and nearly impossible to untangle. What begins as a satire with easily recognizable key characters swiftly becomes an end-of-the-world scenario. But wait! That’s only the beginning. Suddenly the book becomes a thriller, with Lai Zhen fleeing from a mysterious killer in the world’s largest shopping mall. This fades into a love story between Lai Zhen and Martha Einkorn that dissolves into a devious plan of revenge. It seems to culminate in an episode of Survivor, with four people on a deserted island that has no means of communication with whatever is left of the world. 

Naomi Alderman has an imagination that can only be described as diabolical. Drawing upon recent events--the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the overwhelming amount of wealth and power controlled by a very few people--she throws her readers into a morass of fiction that borders perilously upon fact. Not since H.G. Wells created The War of the Worlds has any writer so skillfully manipulated nightmares into what seems to be a prophesy—or reality.

“You think you can change something big about the world and it ends with destruction. Every single time….What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?” This simple observation and desperate question are both resonant and provocative. Although even the smartest of readers may find themselves floundering in the nooks and crannies of The Future, Martha Einkorn’s words will keep them enmeshed in spite of their confusion.

This novel goes through dizzying transformations in a way that’s reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis. It shifts its enticing patterns as quickly as it abandons one character for another or jumps from narration to baffling conversations on a survivalist forum. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah comes into play as God is asked “Will you spare the city if ten good men can be found within it?” The Future inverts this question by asking “Can the world be saved if four people are sacrificed?”

It’s a well-worn cliche to say that a book is mystifying right up to its last page. The Future continues to tease and baffle its readers beyond the last sentence of its last chapter. Placed in a part of a book that is rarely looked at are two sentences that upend whatever one might believe the ending is. Alderman goes beyond a cliffhanger into what amounts to literary sadism and makes a sequel inevitable. It looks as though she’s taken notes from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. If so, she owes us all two more novels, sooner rather than later.~Janet Brown

Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor)

When a man buys the woman he loves a star,  Earth’s fate is sealed. Centuries before, a Trisolaran identified humanity’s primary weapon as love. Now it becomes the instrument of the planet’s destruction.

This is not a plot spoiler, since this book concludes a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Nor is the conquest and subsequent destruction of Earth the most startling facet, or the culmination, of Death’s End. The trilogy has persistently pointed out that the betrayal of humanity will come from humans themselves and every character has shown to some degree that this is true. In this conclusion, the end of our world is set into motion by Cheng Xin, a woman so steeped in compassion and ethics that she’s unable to become an aggressor, not even when that’s called for.

Within the first half of this book, the Earth has been conquered, humans have become slave labor in migrant camps, and the entire solar system becomes endangered. At this point, we are all at the mercy of Cixin Liu’s diabolical imagination, cast out into space, exploring the threats of altered dimensions while swooping through millennia at dizzying speed.

It’s been obvious from the first book in this trilogy that Cixin Liu has a vast body of scientific knowledge that many of us lack. Footnotes provided by the translator can take readers only so far. When scientific theories and truths become intertwined with the settings envisioned by Liu, ordinary minds boggle. His plots range so wide that to summarize them is impossible. It’s hard enough to keep up with them when reading. There’s only one thing to do: buckle up, take a deep breath, hold on tight, and enjoy the journey.

There’s much to enjoy. Cities with buildings that hang like leaves from gigantic trees, an elevator that whisks humans through the Milky Way, the glory of a sunrise seen from space, an entire universe captured in an orb that creates a perfect Eden of only a few miles. 

Although Liu’s universe is alluring, its vast loneliness enforces its own rules. “Let me tell you,” the commanding officer of a rogue spaceship says, “when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”

When humans are lost in Liu’s imagination, it takes only five minutes to reach fascination and fear. Questions of indvidual responsibility emerge into an uncomfortable precedence and fantasies feel unsettlingly close to predictions. Suddenly our forays into space seem as though they’re a foolhardy and naive act of hubris. What sleeping civilization might this provoke?

Does that sound absurd? On this planet where some people drown while fleeing in unseaworthy boats while others look for new sanctuaries in their private spacecrafts, it seems a quick step to reach the scenarios created by Cixin Liu. By combining his expertly observed insights of human nature with the terrors that can be found within a two-dimensional universe or in the body of a beautiful robot powered by artificial intelligence, he takes the realities of today and extrapolates them into the plausible horrors of the future.~Janet Brown

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (Tor)

In his sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu steps out into a whole other world. The Earth is aware that its Doomsday is approaching and inevitable. Trisolaris has covered the planet with a shield of protons that receive and transmit every word that is spoken beneath its envelope of surveillance. Some humans who have the means are considering Escapism, a flight to safe planets, while others choose to undergo hibernation, planning to revive themselves when the Doomsday battle takes place. 

The woman who set this disaster into motion is preparing to die but first she finds an undistinguished academic, Luo Ji, and gives him two axioms that hold the secret of cosmic sociology, but only under the right conditions. Burdened with secrets that might save humanity but which he has no idea of how to use. Luo Ji becomes the most wanted man on Earth and is chosen as one of the men whose brains might forestall Doomsday.

In a transmission to an ally on Earth, Trisolaris reveals a fatal flaw and discovers a human advantage. Trisolarans communicate through thought alone and every thought they have is on visible display. They live in a society without hidden plans, lies, or subterfuge, and initially regard human speech as a biological weakness. Quickly they begin to understand that the human mind is something to fear and humans realize that duplicity is their key to survival. They assemble a group of intellectuals who will develop defense systems in silence, with alternate untruths being sent to Trisolaris in spoken words. The Wallfacers, as they are called, all succumb to the Trisolaris allies called Wallbreakers, all except for Luo Ji.

His plans are all self-serving and hedonistic, allowing him an earthly paradise shared only with the woman he loves. Trisolaris decides he’s ridiculous, worthy only of their extermination. When they infect him with a genetic weapon, a flu that will kill only him,  his doctors put him into hibernation, hoping when he revives in another century there will be a cure for his illness.

But Luo Ji not only carries a fatal virus, he has discovered the secret of the axioms given to him by Ye Wenjie. Can he use them to avert Doomsday?

Once again Cixin Liu has taken a cliched plot and enriched it with prophetic details,  puzzling science, and unexpected swerves. The Dark Forest is more opaque and difficult than its predecessor. Although the story rushes into new arenas, they seem to be dead ends, fascinating but unconnected to the general plot. Even when the ending seems to bring a conclusion, there are too many undecided fates for this to be satisfying--and far too many unanswered questions.

The perennial problem of constructing the middle of an adventure in a way that makes readers want to move on to the next installment is made murkier than usual because of a change in translators. Ken Liu provided quantities of footnotes that helped readers understand The Three-Body Problem and gave its characters ample dialogue to define and sharpen their different personalities. Translator Joel Martinsen has chosen to offer very little of either, evoking suspicion that he understood little of what he put into English and chose simply to translate The Dark Forest word by word. When the universe is at last revealed to be the dark forest, there will be many readers who have no idea of what this means. 

Fortunately the concluding volume of what has been named the Earth’s Past trilogy is back in the capable and brilliant hands of Ken Liu, the perfect choice to  clarify the complexities of Cixin Liu’s enigmatic genius. Don’t stop reading--help is on the way!~Janet Brown

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor)

Although the Cultural Revolution wasn’t the greatest of humanity’s evils, three deaths that it caused during the late 1960s would be the impetus for the destruction of life on earth in the following century. Ye Wenjie saw her father and her favorite university professor die under the mental and physical torture inflicted by the Red Guards, while her sister was killed by those who had been in the first wave of this reign of terror.

When the 20th century makes room for the 21st, Ye Wenjie has the knowledge and the opportunity while working at a military installation to send a message out into space. When she receives a reply, it tells her repeatedly, “Do not answer.” Any response she might make would lead to the invasion and conquest of her planet. Wenjie, steeped in the brutal history of the past century, welcomes the thought of a hostile take-over and the doom of humanity is sealed by her next message.

An invasion from outer space is an ordinary theme in many works of science fiction, but this time it’s been twisted and turned by Cixin Liu into a trilogy, with The Three-Body Problem as its fiendish and confounding introduction. Using an intricate, multi-leveled virtual reality game as a snare, the extraterrestrial world of Trisolaris finds its way into the minds of other disillusioned members of the human world. Giving them peeks at the history of Trisolaris, with its three suns creating alternating time periods of Chaos and Stability, showing how Trisolarans survive times of Chaos by dehydrating into “dry, fibrous objects” which they rehydrate back to life  during Stabile Eras, Trisolaris gains toeholds into some of the best human intellects. With its superior technology, Trisolaris begins to damage the acceleration of human technological prowess, an acceleration that’s far swifter than their own, due to Earth’s environmental advantages. To Trisolarans, humans live in paradise, developing under the gentle power of a single sun, and they want this existence for themselves.

In a diabolical game of chess, Trisolaris begins a subtle destruction of Earth’s science, placing doubts of its importance in human minds and planting skepticism in the minds of scientists by carefully revealing the limits of what they thought were laws of the universe. Ye Wenjie becomes the leader of the Earth Trisolaris Organization, joined by an American plutocrat who carries on communication with the Trisolarans. Both of them welcome the destruction that Trisolaris promises. 

An attack force launched by Trisolaris will reach the Earth in four or five centuries, a successful capture of the interplanetary communication reveals. Trisolaris has no fear that Earth will find a way to repel its future invasion, sending human scientists a disdainful message through space and time: “You’re bugs.” 

However, as a nonscientist points out to the panic-stricken intellectuals, bugs are unconquerable, prevailing against attacks of technology.

The ffirst installment of Cixin Liu’s trilogy was first published in a Chinese magazine as a serial in 2006. Published as a book two years later, Its English translation came out in 2014, two years before politicians in the US placed science under attack. This time-frame makes the Trisolaran use of ignorance as a weapon seem prescient now. After all, how many people have died from Covid-19 in 2020 because they didn’t believe in the science that provided vaccinations? 

Along with its predictive qualities, The Three-Body Problem goes beyond ordinary sci-fi with its fully-fleshed characters, its enigmatic glimpses into the field of physics,  and its clever distortion of time as its story unfolds. “Science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations,” Cixun Liu says in an afterword--not only accessible to science fiction readers but irresistible to those who usually would rather read the words on a cereal box instead. This book takes a soaring leap into the literary possibilities of science fiction, with its next installment, The Dark Forest, promising to extend that neglected genre even deeper into the realm of literature.~Janet Brown