My partner keeps trying to read it and they keep stopping and reading me passages and then looking up actual historical fact and going wtf, this book is nonsense? Does it get better?
I don’t know I haven’t read it. I told them I’d ask here. Does it get better? Is it anti communist propaganda or is the ridiculous anti communist screed that starts this book serious off just setup for something better?
Thanks for all the good answers I showed them the whole thread and they said a lot of what you all said is in line with their understanding. So basically the first bit is a caricature of the bad parts of early Chinese communism and then that gets better but it turns misogynist instead. Fun series. They’ll continue to read because we have a lot of family and friends who LOVE the book and they want to understand why but it’s helpful to have the lens on it
Its not anti comunist. Its politics are not coherent so it may somtimes seem a bit lib. From what i remember of the first book the author likes china as it is now and thinks there should be more funding for basic science. Wich i agree with. So its not bad. But dosent have any belefs besides that.
The phisics is almost completly wrong tho.
Someone else pointed out it is very popular with the current chinise intelligentsia. Wich makes sense because it somewhat flaters that type of person. The parts about the cultural revolution seem to be due to that pandering. But i did not think it was really malicious.
I liked it, not enough to read the seqiels tho. In my case it was the phisics being wrong that made it seem cheap. It felt in some parts like the cops personality that the aithor was trying too hard to be a campbellian. At least the campbellians were scientists and engeneeres.
I’ve been meaning to read this book. I recently watched the wandering earth movie on netflix, and I didn’t get any anti communist vibe at all. If anything it showed a lot of cooperation between nations and the some of communism’s strengths.
Let me save you 35 hours and just tell you that the book series is the equivalent of two 12 year olds playing top trumps with pages ripped out of a theoretical physics textbook.
I stopped a couple of pages in because of this, I got a vibe
I love those books and am fine with that making me a radical centrist (on this website)
