'death's end' and the end of art

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
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humankind doesn't create art
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art is dangerous, corrupting, bad
( Read more... )

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.