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This trilogy is one of the most interesting and ambitious things I’ve ever read. The scale of the story consistently expands, and there is unique profundity to the concepts that the author introduces. It leaves you contemplating the depth of our place in the universe, and the philosophies upon which we entrust ourselves to evolve further into the unknown. It's going to be a Netflix series soon, so read it before it gets ruined by Corporate Money Goblins!
May 30, 2023
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This trilogy is one of the most interesting and ambitious things I’ve ever read. The scale of the story consistently expands, and there is unique profundity to the concepts that the author introduces. It leaves you contemplating the depth of our place in the universe, and the philosophies upon which we entrust ourselves to evolve further into the unknown. It's going to be a Netflix series soon, so read it before it gets ruined by Corporate Money Goblins!
May 30, 2023
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With the Netflix series coming out, I can't recommend the book trilogy enough.
It's the approachable sort of hard sci-fi that delves into complicated concepts without getting too deeply into the weeds. Everything is really well set up and explained, and like all the best trilogies, every book in the series gets better than the one that came before.
It was also written by a Chinese author (Cixin Liu) in the early 2000s, so it offers a unique perspective and gives you a glimpse into how someone from a country like China (the world's second largest economy, but with dramatically different economic/political processes and historical/cultural development than the US or Europe) views the realities of the present and the possibilities of the future (spoiler: its way more optimistic than a lot of Western authors... to an extent).
But most importantly, the series is full of some really interesting ideas and concepts, especially in regard to the Fermi Paradox. It makes you think, imagine, and philosophize, which is what I love about reading sci-fi. Anyway, it's definitely worth reading the series before having your idea of it tainted by the TV show, which will inevitably butcher certain aspects, and tarnish what your imagination could have dreamt up on its own.
Mar 24, 2024
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Obsessed with this Chinese sci-fi novel right now. It's putting to words a lot of the unavoidable existential dread that we're all trying to ignore. I'm not usually a big fan of super hard sci-fi because I'm for the most part scientifically illiterate, but this book does such a good job of making physics poetic and kind of horrifying.
Sep 20, 2022
Top Recs from @jake-bercovici
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French Prog Rock from 1979. Are you naked yet? Very little is written about this extremely weird and cool record. I randomly got this on vinyl a long time ago, not knowing what it was, and it has become impossible to find anywhere except of course— someone loaded it onto YouTube a while ago. The magic comes from the DIY nerd-flow of melodic ideas, the bedroom-album ambition, the tactile energy of the tones, and BONUS: there is limited Muso-Overplaying that so much Prog Music gets defined by. It sounds like 1779 had sex with 1979 on a bed of Parisian cassettes.
May 30, 2023
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I’ve grown so fucking sick of DAWs and computers— yes I know what’s great about them. After 20 years of sitting in front of a computer to record music, I’ve decided to go back to my roots. Making music without the rancid glow of a massive screen, without Safari lurking in the dock, without the gnarly centerpiece energy of a huge Apple product, has been liberating. I’m done with Tetrissing ideas, done frame fucking waveforms, done dragging 1s and 0s with a mouse. So now I’m focused on making sequences on the MPC one, building my own kits, and sampling audio from an array of synths or records or life— and it all goes stereo-out into the Tascam 446 that Beardo gave me. The vulnerability & humanity I’m interested in experiencing through music gets watered down by the digital horseshit we readily accept as software convenience.
May 30, 2023