On the Book List

Oni just lent me the series The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I was sitting at their kitchen table, enjoying a lovely glass ‘o’ the grape, when I couldn’t help but notice the blurb BY OBAMA on the front cover. Just two words: “Wildly imaginative.”

Yup, between Oni’s thumbs up AND Obama’s I’m mega eager to read.

"Fans of hard SF will revel in this intricate and imaginative novel by one of China’s most celebrated genre writers. In 1967, physics professor Ye Zhetai is killed after he refuses to denounce the theory of relativity. His daughter, Ye Wenjie, witnesses his gruesome death.

Shortly after, she’s falsely charged with sedition for promoting the works of environmentalist Rachel Carson, and told she can avoid punishment by working at a defense research facility involved with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. More than 40 years later, Ye’s work becomes linked to a string of physicist suicides and a complex role-playing game involving the classic physics problem of the title.” (source)

Seems kinda timely, n'est-ce pas?

And what is this “hard SF” stuff anyway.

"Hard science fiction exists inside the realm of scientific possibility. That is, anything that occurs in the story is not outside the known physical laws of the universe. In these stories, there is often an emphasis on this accuracy." (source)

OK, so I guess I’m gonna learn while I read, eh?

Also, on my long list of books to borrow from the Thomas Crane:
The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff

"A woman finds a forgotten suitcase in Grand Central. It’s filled with photographs.
Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a ring of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery.

...inspired by true events" (source)

Yeah, stories about women living lives NOT limited to biology – mothering, whelping the bairn and shit – are always gonna rope me in.

And, south of London, east of Grand Central another collection of tales unfolds in Here In Berlin by Christina Garcia.

"The city itself is a character--vibrant and post-apocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine for five months, only to return home to a family who doesn't believe him; the young Jewish scholar whose husband hides her in a sarcophagus until he can find them safe passage to England; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes, setting personal guilt against the larger flow of history; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich on the Russian front, at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at The Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace." (source)

I want to read them all NOW.