'death's end' and the end of art

[agletbaby]

i finally finished death's end, and thereby polished off the remembrance of earth's past trilogy, three years after starting. despite what the timelag suggests, i liked the first two books a lot, with albeit massive caveats. these i was able to overlook, partly because the story was good, and partly because i have a real soft spot for 20th cent american scifi, so i'm pretty great at tuning out horrible attitudes. i think liu is at least as bad as those guys, but the three body problem and the dark forest are genuinely deeply interesting, intricate books, so it was enough to roll eyes at the almost comically poor depiction of women, and keep reading. not so in death's end

a positive to open with, though. liu is a great mystery writer. it’s deeply satisfying to see how all the carefully established components slot into their eventual place in the plot. sometimes a certain intriguing event or phenomenon (or clue) might seem to disappear from the story, but it's never a lasting concern, because you know it'll come back in. liu is extremely careful about giving you the info as you need to solve the plot, no more, no less.
appropriately, his writing evoked shimada soji's introduction to the english translation of the decagon house murders, in which he writes: '[ayatsuji's] novel approached the form of a game [...] As a result, his characters act almost like robots, their thoughts depicted only minimally through repetitive phrases. The narration shows no interest in sophisticated writing or a sense of art and is focused solely on telling the story.'
it was the robot bit specifically which came to mind during death's end. liu’s characters, you see, are less people and more devices to drive the plot to where it needs to get to for the science to get interesting. like sophon, the novel’s token robot, they are there to serve a purpose dictated by an unseen but controlling force, covered by a thin and too-good-to-be-true gloss of humanity to lend them conviction.
and, as with the present's own robots, ais, they reproduce their creator’s biases too.

death's end is consistently sexist and racist. that's not what i want to talk about here, but it's important to flag. i also want to say that i think it's so funny there was some drama around the english translations of the books (possibly just the dark forest?) being edited to be less sexist, when the sexism is so deeply baked into the plot and setting of this one. also it's still definitely there in vocab, even in translation.

what i actually want to talk about is liu's view of art. he has, to put it simply, the deep and fundemental vibe of one of those guys who thinks we should defund the arts because it's a waste of time and money, and instead everyone should do stem. which is kind of weird given he's an author. but i guess his chosen genre has science in the title and therefore counts in the acronym.

and the fact is, remembrance of earth's past is a deeply sciencey narrative. his approach to scifi is to extrapolate from the hottest of scientific theories, and shape it into a story. like how detective stories might hinge on the real and particular effects of a poison, his work orbits around the supposed possibilites of physics. which is fine - makes me feel like i'm learning something. but what it seems to mean for him is that scientific progress is all that the human race requires as it endures into the future. and i think that's simply not true.

i want to note some instances from death's end that i think demonstrate liu's attitude. there may be some minor spoilers, so i will hide it, but honestly i can't recommend this book. (i do think the first two are still worth it if the premise really appeals to you.) it's also important to note that i am writing this from a deeply different cultural context than liu, and the touchstones i'm referring to here will not apply to him. but i also think 1) he's writing about the whole world (even if he thinks he only needs to bother with asia, north america, europe and australia), 2) i'm reading it, 3) it really bothered me to be faced with the assumed acceptance of this attitude, and i'd like to begin articulating a response so as to better confront it when i next inevitably encounter it.

so, here's what art is doing in death's end

(good) art represents physical phenomena

• for liu, existing art is only a useful reference as it pertains to describing the real world. at one point, he very jarringly brings up baz lurhmann's australia, a weird pull (especially 5 centuries in the future), which is clearly evoked because it allows for a shortcut to describing australia the country. elsewhere, starry night is mentioned, which surprised me, because i assumed van gogh was a little abstract for his tastes. a couple of pages later, it's being used as a tool for describing the literal warping of planets in space. the situation renders it realism.
• the art liu values is hyper-realistic. at one point the protagonist speculates vaguely about what art will be like in the utopian future she's just woken up in, given how wacky it was getting when she went into hibernation (she's roughly from the early 21th century). but thankfully, in this utopia, art has gotten much better :) now it's hyperrealistic. and also deeply emotive. in some sort of unnatural way which is described more as mood control than genuine connection or affect. art is, at its best, the visual equivalent of a massage chair.
• it is, in fact, plot critical that art directly correlates to real phenomena. there's a chunk in the middle where earthlings have to solve a fairytale in order to find clues about how to protect the earth. yeah. they even bring in literature scholars to help - making very clear that everyone (including the literature scholars) knows they'll be useless. which they are. it turns out the fairytale basically has 1:1 to correlations with real physics, which are coded through layered metaphors. usually, layered metaphors mean ambiguity, the potential to resonate in constantly evolving or separate ways. here, it means different details to the story directly correlate to different aspects of phenomena, in ways carefully designed to confirm each other. it's like a sudoku - you need bits to allow you to objectively fill in others. it's like everything poetry isn't

humankind doesn't create art

• as mentioned above, in the utopian future, it's realism which rules the art scene. but those realist works that really affect the human protagonist are not something that have evolved into being in a society which has the capacity to support artists, creatives and creations (which, to me, a utopia makes). no. they're made by aliens. i assume the logic is that the trisolarians are better at art than humans because they're better at science and therefore at capturing and replicating phenomena. art is taken out of humanity's hands, because there's too much ambiguity and mystery left in our understanding of the universe; famously traits which dampen creativity, i hear.
• at one point, liu neutrally describes how 'written narrative literature had disappeared more than a century ago. "literature" and "authors" still existed, but narratives were constructed with digital images'. which is just so stupid to me. it completely ignores the joy and power of words arranged just so. the possibilities of it. it's not even looking ahead to the rise of graphic novels, because what's described here reads to me like prompting ai-generated images and putting them in an order. writing ceases to be, and this isn't a cause for any concern - it's barely referenced. this is also a world in which a bunch of people from our era are still alive, and you're telling me none of them were like 'damn i would like to write in response to this situation'? god.
• death's end presents hundreds of years of speculative future in which society is constantly oscellating between peace, progress, uncertainty and jepoardy. yet the future societies also don't seem to have much in the way of culture. nationalities still exist, but things are very homogenised: they make space stations in different shapes. that's about it for nationality. the culture which does appear revolves around technological advances, a sort of flat taste, and weird (as in, liu is weird about it) gender presentation stuff. and all the art which does still exist by the end of the book are pieces from our time: i already mentioned starry night, and the mona lisa's there too. production and appreciation seems to have ceased now, even as science rockets on. and this is a world where that's fine.

art is dangerous, corrupting, bad

• there are these alien guys who want to destroy the universe, and are basically setting off forever expanding bombs of dimension collapse. it doesn't actually matter very much, but they're there. and when they're bombing, they are 'practicing a kind of religion, a kind of performance art'. art is, in this context, made destructive, naive.
• liu doesn't go in much for metaphors and similes. when he does, they're usually very bad. like 'her feminity was like a pink ink bomb dropped into a lake' bad. but at one point, he describes the literal destruction of the sun as 'the most magnificent scene of the play'. which is not only a weird association between creativity and the end of the world, but describes an event literally brought into being by human action; humanity wrote it. the vibes are weird.
• one character remarks 'i really want to see what a new universe is like before it's distorted and tampered with by life and civilisation. i think it must exhibit the highest degree of harmony and beauty'. not only, for this character, is beauty an entirely natural phenomena, his assessment is borne out by the story, in that the universe does prove to be ruined by civilisation. (see: sun destruction and alien bombs.) this guy is a human in story, but for the story to work, he's a robot reproducing the biases of his creators. but it's not just him, it's a whole world. beauty in liu's universe truly is something unrelated to what people can make. it's better without humanity to interpret it. and this is taken to be true, straightforwardly and without concern

remembrance of earth's past is about humankind surviving the apocolypse. the very fundamental set-up of the series isn't too different to 'independence day' or 'war of the worlds': the aliens are coming, and not in peace. the difference, however, is that remembrance of earth's past is not just set now. (well, the first book is, now and in the near past, and that's probably why it's objectively the best.) it sets up futures. and it sets up a future i can't believe in, root for, or mourn the possibility of losing.

liu writes a lot about humanity's reaction to things. his main characters are all very much individuals with their own quirky takes on the world, but they're in conversation with humanity, who function as a chorus, are always taken in by propaganda, follow the (usually doomsday) decrees of science, and who i don't recognise at all. they're a body of people without art, without culture, without response.

i actually find the fact that this world, in which humans lack the capacity to create beautiful things, can be imagined more concerning than any of the constant threat it's under. it's a world which dismisses creativity outside of a lab, and ignores why people are able to bear the incresingly falling sky vibe of being alive today. art is a place of connection, calm, meaning, protest, discussion, understanding, curiosity, utopia. ultimately, it doesn't matter to liu - nothing matters to liu, the science points to the death of the sun and the collapse of the universe, and so on the big timescales, who remembers one person, one artwork, one moment? liu is a hypocrite, of course: his work is full of characters making worldchanging decisions, often emotion based, dreaming of the past; they save starry night and mona lisa from [redacted major event]. the fact is we, as people don't live at universal timescales, nor worldwide consciousness ones (?). it's near impossible to write someone who does (just ask god emp of dune lol). and given we are living here and now in our little worlds, we need our little arts. and we need it, i think, to imagine a humanity who cares about that to care about. i guess. ugh. cringe.