Comes now a Big Fat Science Fiction Trilogy I’m going to have to read again. Thanks to Randy Smith of Destinations Booksellers (yay, independent bookstores!), I got all three volumes of The Three Body Trilogy for a reasonable price, two of the volumes in hardback.

YES

The Three Body Trilogy, by Cixin Liu, was originally published in China, the first volume (The Three Body Problem) being serialized in China’s biggest science fiction magazine. It, and the subsequent volumes (The Dark Forest and Death’s End), swept the world.

And there’s a moobie!

My only problem with the trilogy is the almost total lack of animal presence, and the only reason that bothers me is that the author encompasses so much, anything missing is obvious.

Apparently, other fans have similar problems. A world as … well … stellar in scope as this one can’t explore everything, and there’s a large body of TBP fan fiction out there. No, I am not going down that rabbit hole. (Rabbits. What about rabbits in the future? — NO! Get thee behind me, Satan!)

One fan, in fact, wrote such an excellent and popular novel-length fan piece, the original publisher of The Three Body Trilogy picked it up and published it! The Redemption of Time is due out in English in 2019, and you better believe I’m buying it! In fact, I just pre-ordered it. BOOM!

NO

On the other hand, I bought a hardback autographed copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, and I don’t think I’ll read beyond the fourth chapter. No link, you’ll notice. No link for you, Kim Stanley Robinson. Clunky and didactic, it suffers immensely by comparison to Cixin Liu’s masterwork. It does have animals: gibbons, on the moon “to help scientists with their research”. No. Just no. I’ll have to go back and read Robinson’s masterwork, his Mars trilogy, to get the taste of Red Moon out of my brain. Blech. If any of you read it all the way through and loved it, please let me know why. I’ll give it another go on your recommendation.

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Write about rabbits in the future.