this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
55 points (100.0% liked)
Science Fiction
13566 readers
15 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone that's always looking for more science fiction content, I'm looking forward to this. The game of thrones guys did a good job when they had someone else's written content so this might actually be pretty good.
I'm very weary. The books where very China centric, understandable being written by a Chineese author, and fear a white washing.
Also, even though I loved the books, there was something... odd about them. I'm not sure if it was something lost in translation, or just that some of it felt. IDK over simplified, childish? I think it's a combination of all of them, and I really wonder what they'll have to do to make a TV Show from that source material to have mass appeal here in the west.
Agree about the odd quality. It feels like a plot driven rather than character driven book - the characters are there because the plot demands it. I never ended up liking any of the characters. They all felt robotic, cold, in their way of thinking and in the dialogue, or it felt like someone writing a historical account and putting words in their mouths that’s roughly what they said but not actually what they said. Maybe this is a result of the translation, but the translator I believe was also Chinese, and the non dialogue portions had pretty good prose.
That is a very common feeling when Americans consume Chinese media. It was first brought to my attention in an Asian studies course in 2006. In "the east" there is much less focus on the individuals that participate in the story, there are no heroes, no fated people, it's society that drives the story.
I've since started looking at Western media with a bit more scrutiny, and sometimes the Deus ex machina surrounding the lead characters is laughable.
I had a really hard time with the first book and eventually gave up--quite a rare thing with me. I felt like the translation wasn't working for me, but that's a hard thing to judge without actually finishing the book.