This TV Sci Fi series made a big splash, last month. I didn’t see it but watched some clips and read reviews. It looks interesting. Some here may have seen it or liked it. The recap seems good if you do not mind spoilers. The presenter is a bit annoying but there are a lot of other choices, if you need them.
In December 2019, The New York Times cited The Three-Body Problem as having helped to popularize Chinese science fiction internationally, crediting the quality of Ken Liu’s English translation, as well as endorsements of the book by George R. R. Martin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former U.S. president Barack Obama.[14] George R. R. Martin wrote a blog about the novel, personally expressing its worthiness of the Hugo Award.[21] Obama said the book had “immense” scope, and that it was “fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with United States Congress seem fairly petty”.[22]
Kirkus Reviews wrote that “in concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.”[23]
The book series is also a good read.
The Cretaceous Past
2021by Cixin Liu
read by B. J. Harrison
All the years of human civilization represent an infinitesimal fraction of the time since life first burgeoned on planet Earth. How likely is it, then, in those great depths of time, that humanity alone benefitted from the spark of intelligence which gave rise to culture?This is the question posed by Hugo Award winner Cixin Liu, in his magisterial new short novel The Cretaceous Past. The answer he offers is unexpected, supposing an unlikely alliance between the largest creatures in the world of the deep past and some of the smallest. And it all begins with a toothache.
When a Tyrannosaurus rex suffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creature’s maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaur’s most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, facing dangers and exploiting opportunities at every turn.
In this absorbing tale, Cixin Liu manages to describe the history of successive epochs of a might-have-been world, doing for the past what Olaf Stapledon’s classic Last and First Men did for the future.