Category: Läsning / Reading

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu does what a sequel must do: It continues the story. In this case, the previous book The Three-Body Problem ended with the Earth in a bad state where we have four centuries to prepare for the arrival of a hostile fleet of extra-terrestrials who has made sure that any new fundamental developments of human technology will fail. In The Dark Forest we see how Earth tackles this delicate issue.

Even though no new fundamental physics is possible, we humans can at least develop the present technology as far as possible, including the very practical hibernation technology allowing people to take some “time-outs” while waiting for the invasion. However, the extra-terrestrials (the tri-solarans) are able to eavesdrop on all human communication so it is a bit tricky for humans to develop any advanced strategies even within those boundary conditions. The solution is of course to develop strategies without communication. This is possible because the tri-solaran cannot read minds. This is the fundamental idea behind the Wallfacer Project: Four individual humans are given almost unlimited resources to use for whatever they want. They do not have to justify anything, just ask for whatever they need without explanations. Three of the Wallfacers are well known political and scientific figures, but the fourth one is an unknown and unambitios astronomer and sociologist. His name is Luo Ji, and he is the main character in the book.

There is quite a number of other characters that we also follow through The Dark Forest, and I think that they are the weakest point of the book. They are a bit too many and too similar to each other for my taste. I simply had difficulties keeping myself updated about who they all are (yes, I have some troubles remembering Chinese names) and which ones are active or hibernating at the different parts of the storyline. The book is full of interesting ideas but it feels a little tougher to read than the first one. The reason could be that the two books had different translators into English. In the end, the story comes to a relatively satisfying conclusion, although it felt a bit odd to have such a long text finished in such a rushed way. Or is it concluded? I guess I will see that in the third book in the series.

Det skrivna ordet har otvivelaktigen haft stort inflytande över den västerländska civilisationens utveckling. Dels har det använts i praktiska sammanhang såsom bokföring, kontrakt och lagtexter, men framför allt har det sett till att någons idéer kan leva vidare i årtusenden efter att upphovsmännen gått bort. Det är förstås det sistnämnda som Irene Vallejo fascineras av i sådan mån att hon skrivit boken Papyrus, med undertiteln Om bokens födelse i den antika världen.

Mycket i boken kretsar kring biblioteket i Alexandria, vilket var ett mycket ambitiöst projekt på sin tid. Kung Ptolemaios II i Egypten hade fått infallet att samla all världens texter under ett (sitt) tak, att så att säga få monopol över det skrivna ordet och därmed all världens kunskap. Detta i en nyskapad huvudstad som till att börja med mest var ett sankt område i Nilens delta. Detta är i sig spännande, men Vallejo har större ambitioner i sin bok än att systematiskt beskriva fakta om litteraturens framväxt i den klassiska världen. Hon beskriver hur böcker formade både den antika världen och vår nutida tillvaro. Hon går igenom den fysiska närvaron av “bok”, och hon försöker fånga växelverkan mellan vad som finns mellan bokens pärmar och vad som händer inuti läsaren av orden. Det är alltså inte bara bokens historia, utan själva läsandets historia som avhandlas. Det är ambitiöst, men det är i stort sett inte pretentiöst.

Vallejo besitter uppenbarligen stora kunskaper om antikens texter. I Papyrus förmedlas de via anekdoter om personer, texter och händelser, vilka blandas upp med personliga reflektioner och inslag från hennes egen historia samt associationer till diverse nutida fenomen. Det blir lite rörigt, det blir lite ordrikt, men berättarglädjen är så stor att man ändå rycks med som läsare. Jag har dock insett att jag har problem med tidsangivelser av typen “första århundradet före Kristus”. Är det månne sista århundradet före Kristus som avses då? Och vad menas egentligen med “första halvan av första århundradet före Kristus”? Min temporära temporala förvirring till trots känner jag mig numera mer bildad än innan jag läste Papyrus, och dessutom underhållen.

Det känns lite ovant att kalla böcker för rara, men Marigold och Rose kan helt enkelt bara beskrivas som en rar liten bok. Poeten och Nobelpristagaren Louise Glück har i sitt första prosaverk försökt formulera tillvaron för ett par tvillingar (titelns Marigold och Rose) under det första levnadsåret sett från deras egna perspektiv. Rose är social medan Marigold är lite mer eftertänksam och väntar på att lära sig fler ord så att hon kan skriva sin bok.

Boken är mycket kort, men innehåller trots det många små underfundigheter. Glück skriver med ett exakt språk, och det känns som att varje ord är vägt med guldvåg – även i den svenska översättningen. Marigold och Rose är med sina 72 sidor en mycket rar bekantskap.

The three-body problem in classical mechanics is the problem to determine the motion of three point masses interacting gravitationally and followng Newton’s laws of motion. It is often used as a type example of a physics problem that is easy to state, but where there is not possible to find a general solution in closed form. The resulting dynamical system will for almost all cases exhibit chaotic evolution. The problem also serves as inspiration for Cixin Liu when authoring his book The Three-Body Problem, just as its title may hint.

The story begins in China in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysics graduate who witnesses her father being beaten to death beacuse of his refusal to stop teaching modern physics. Ye is forced to work at a labour camp in Inner Mongolia, and is later recruited to forced work as a scientist at a top secret military radio project, Red Coast, with a strong transmitter and sensitive receiver used for initially unknown purposes. What can possibly go wrong when a brilliant scientist with extremely pessimistic view of the direction of human endevours has access to such equipment?

About forty years later, Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor, is asked to work together with a blunt and rude detective to investigate why many reseachers, including Ye Wenjies daughter, in the frontline of science have recently killed themselves under what seems like coordinated cirumstances. The two further note that the governments in the world are preparing for war with some external enemy, and that there seems to be a connection to an online computer game with three-body thematics. These two plot lines are of course interconnected; there is a first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation in there. We have a few hundred years to prepare.

I must say that it was mildly confusing to read a book almost immediately after seeing it as a TV series. On one hand, I was already aware of the direction the story would take, but at the same time there are rather big changes in the collection of characters involved and also in the focus of the plot. I really enjoyed a clearly unfilmable section describing the creation of supercomputers, made from unfolding inherently 11-dimensional protons into two dimensions, etching strong-interaction based circuitry, and then refolding it back into a proton now containing artificial intelligence. These are the “sophons”.

The Three-Body Problem is fun to read. It has both a story that is exciting and some science to which I can relate. The setting is also in China, and that is an environment I do not have a lot of experience with through popular culture (the translator has actually added some footnotes to explain the context of some references that I would have had problems understanding). Those things combined have made me really enjoy the book.

Emelie är en stockholmsjournalist. När hon sommaren 2023 bränner ut sig packar hon ett tält och en sovsäck och ger sig av till sin farmors hemtrakter någonstans i Norrland för att finna lugnet som skogen borde kunna erbjuda. Hon får på avstånd syn på en grupp människor som beter sig märkligt, och börjar följa deras förehavanden på avstånd. Vilka är de sju personerna som tycks kollektivt ha dragit sig undan från resten av samhället?

Annika Norlins bok Stacken börjar lite trevande, men ganska snart börjar de individuella historierna vecklas ut, som svar på frågan. Det handlar om människor som på olika har vänt sig bort från någonting svårt som de inte har haft ork att ta tag i, där historierna vävs samman och till slut landar ute i skogen. De är varken goda eller onda, utan bara just människor som har egna bakgrundshistorier.

I och med att texten till allra största delen är tillbakablickar så är det inte särskilt mycket som rör sig framåt i handlingen, utan istället fylls luckorna i bakgrunden in allt eftersom. Det var just därför som jag hade lite problem att komma in i Stacken. Den kändes liksom lite gles till att börja med, men när jag väl kom in i den så är den väldigt fängslande, och den sätter igång en hel del funderingar. Vad är frihet? Vem är det som bestämmer det? Kan man leva endast i nuet? Allting dras till sin spets när Emelie till slut närmar sig det inhomogena kollektivet vars gemensamhet krockar med hennes extremt individualistiska tankevärld.

Annika Norlin har verkligen fått till en bra och läsvärd debutroman, där hon blandar svärta med humor i precis rätt proportioner och använder ett fint flödande språk. Det märks i texten att hon verkligen gillar all åtta huvudpersonerna i Stacken med tanke hur mycket liv hennes ord har gett dem.

There are some novels that are considered extremely important and influential, but mainly within a certain genre. Dune is one of them (in the case of the epic science fiction genre), and now that I have read it I can understand why.

At some point in the very distant future, a substance called melange (or just “spice”) is utterly important not only beacuse it extends life of humans but also because it is required for safe interstellar navigation. The only source of this substance is a planet called Arrakis (or “Dune”), an extremely dry desert planet. The story begins when duke Leto Atreides by the emperor has been assigned to take over the rulership of Arrakis after the House of Harkonnen, who are not willing to lose control of the melange trade. Leto moves to the planet with his official concubine Lady Jessica and their son Paul. Soon thereafter the Harkonnens attack and Paul and Jessica have to flee into the desert, and they have to face the forgotten factor in all this: the locals.

There are many reasons that I should would not like to read Dune. For instance, I have already seen two filmed versions of the story removing a lot of the tension in the story, every chapter begins with some excerpts from chronicles consistently indicating how the story will conclude and thus further remove tension, and the story leans extremely strong on the concept of a “chosen one”. However, the book works for me anyway because it is written in a clever way. As a reader, I am not familiar in how the book universe works in political, scientific, and cultural ways, but it doesn’t matter much, because the people in the book are themselves entering a whole planet they don’t know how it works. There is a lot of scheming in the book, often on the highest political levels, but also descriptions of how the schemers perceive the scheming and their analysis of the reactions of their counterparts. The book is thus rather instructional in how to navigate through the upper echelons of the far future society. That may be a convenient skill to honour for later.

There are also, of course, many names and concepts present in the book that is hard for an unexperienced reader in the genre to keep track of. And I am such a reader. It didn’t stop me from enjoying the book, but I feel hesitant to ready any of the numerous sequels or prequels that also exist.