Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the contemporary science fiction novel...

Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu
(2004; 2018 English translation by Joel Martinsen)

I got about 25% of the way through before the weekend football seduced me.

So far, no actual scifi, just a guy who is intensely interested in ball lightning, because it fried his parents when he was young. Plus hints that ball lightning hides some fantastical, almost supernatural secrets, which I presume is what I'll be reading about when my DVR queue is empty.

I'm almost finished and I can say that there will be some scifi :)

For now I'll just give my general impressions on this book - they are mostly the same as on the Three-body trilogy: great imagination, less-great characterization and writing but for me this is not detrimental as I'm pulled in by the ideas.
I did chuckle several times when the narrator tries to infer other character's motivations or situation with phrases like "it was obvious that X was ...", only to be proven utterly wrong :)

Because of the delay due to the translation, some parts concerning everyday technology may feel a bit dated but you just have to remember that although the English version just came out, the book was written almost 15 years ago(!)

I just started this (barely past the fried parents) & noticing something that seems to come up fairly often with translations -- a certain hokiness in the prose. I wonder: what's being lost in translation? Would I be appreciating these lines differently if I thought I was reading French poetry or Czech literature? Is there a different kind of upbringing or background reading that would have made me a connoiseur of the aphorism? Or would it just be kind of hokey in the original, too?

"...Idealists and cynics may pity each other, but they're really both fortunate," Mom mused.

Hillary wrote: "noticing something that seems to come up fairly often with translations -- a certain hokiness in the prose...."

Joel Martinson was also the translator for Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest, the middle book in the 3-Body Problem trilogy. I thought Ken Liu probably* did a better translation for the 1st & 3rd books in that trilogy. Ken Liu also writes a lot of SF/F, and has a very human dimension to his own writing. Whefreas Martinson seems to be strictly a translator. I have to say "probably" because middle books in trilogies are often a bit less than their bookends, and it's possible Cixin Liu just didn't write it as well. Translation is hard, even to just reserve basic meaning, and trying to give the result good readability is even harder. It does feel a bit... outliney? ... a Sgt Friday "just the facts" style.

It doesn't give different character different speaking personalities. Everyone uses the same bland "standard American English", like news anchors. But then, the alternative is kind of hokey, too. (I recall a translation of a Japanese work in which some of the character's regional dialects was significant, and the translator tried to map those to different American regional accents; nice try, I suppose, but sounded silly.)

I found it interesting that there's a discussion of a "Jekyll & Hyde" effect, but unrelated to our usual understanding of that meaning divergent personalities. Instead, it refers to the part of the novel where Jekyll was unable to replicate a serum because, as he discovered too late, one of the original ingredients had been contaminated, and the contaminant was vital to its efficacy. He then spent a lot of time trying to replicate the contaminant. Not what we usually associate with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Can you see the moon during the day?” Ding Yi asked.

'Someone did a survey showing that ninety percent of people have never noticed it, but it has often appeared during daytime throughout human history." (From Part 2: "Ding Yi'.)

Can that possibly be true? This sounds bogus.

Also, odd way of phrasing, " it has often appeared during daytime throughout human history". The moon appears in daylight almost every day.

Could it maybe be due to the air pollution in China? Or something else about the other hemisphere?

I dunno but in my family we notice the moon during the day frequently

I’m about a quarter in and the story definitely has me interested but I find myself questioning the translation just a bit. Especially some of the exclamations, before or after the main thing someone says ring false to me. Makes me feel like either the original lines are untranslatable or he ( the translator) just didn’t get quite the right one? In my head it’s a bit like watching a dubbed movie but It’s not taking me out of the story too badly.

So we have a war, China vs. _____. The enemy goes completely unnamed, though at one point when they name carriers Carl Vinson and Stennis, it's clear the US is at least in the lead of the "enemy".

I suspect the fact that the enemy goes unnamed is a device by the translator to make the book more palatable to US audience.

G33z3r wrote: "So we have a war, China vs. _____. The enemy goes completely unnamed, though at one point when they name carriers Carl Vinson and Stennis, it's clear the US is at least in the lead of the "enemy"."

That puzzled me. The enemy is never named, but they have a ship called "Harry S. Truman" and, suspiciously so, a weapon based on the tornado suppression system developped by an American team.


G33z3r wrote: "I suspect the fact that the enemy goes unnamed is a device by the translator to make the book more palatable to US audience."

I did not think of that, and you're probably right. I really wonder how different the original and translated versions are, it really feels like the latter may be clunkier and less cohesive due to the loss of some details.
Speaking of things that bugged me (and may or may not be blamed on the translation), someone should have checked their facts. Malaria is not caused by a virus, and the European Synchrotron is not several kilometers underground.

So, I assume anyone who is going to read this has finished.

SPOILERS


It's about 40% into the book, which takes awhile, before Cixin Liu gets into inventing new science, but what he comes up with is pretty wild. And once he posits the first idea, macroscopic electrons, he then continues on to other equally weird but ideas that semi-logically follow: macroscopic nuclei and macroscopic quantum effects. It's all very weird, and easy to point out problems, but it's definitely imaginative in a very old-school way ("let's invent some new scientific discovery and see where it leads.")

Yes and in the afterward he talks about how the ‘new invention ‘ SF is apparently what ‘Classic Chinese SF’ is which is why it is not to the same depth of exploring the full ramifications of new inventions (upheaval in society following industrial revolution; current upheaval with our ongoing technological revolution)

My thoughts currently:

Not sure what I think yet. Similar to three body trilogy in the ‘way-out-there-yet-hard-science’ feel/tone. Much tighter focus here. Not sure about the translation- it felt....clunky maybe? Like phrasing didn’t fit the characters....

It's definitely very imaginative and wild. Tornadoes as weapons? An electron the size of a football and bigger, whaaat? It felt strange to me that the characters were not that concerned about the huge flaw in it as a weapon, though; as soon as its principle is known, it is not hard to protect strategic targets.
Lin Yun is a creepy character. I hope that not every high-ranked general in the Chinese army has a sociopath for a daughter :)

G33z3r wrote: "“Can you see the moon during the day?” Ding Yi asked.

'Someone did a survey showing that ninety percent of people have never noticed it, but it has often appeared during daytime throughout human h..."

Actually I have encountered people that think the Moon never appears during the day *head shake* 90% seems too big a number but there are definitely people who don't notice what's in front of their face due to their assumption that moon = night. Oddly they do know there are some nights when the moon doesn't show, but don't equate that with the fact that it means the moon must somewhere else! I couldn't find stats, but it's common enough to be included in the NASA common misconceptions about the moon - https://moon.nasa.gov/about/misconcep...

I found it a bit of a slow start until they started fooling around with their soccer ball sized electrons which I thought was an interesting thought experiment when you start thinking about how such things could diffract (I recall back in high school learning about diffraction and wondering if a person went through a properly sized opening could they diffract and what would that be like :) ) Ultimately though I felt it was a story about a group of seriously damaged people more than anything else.

Since I had read Saturn Run first and G33z3r had mentioned how it was interesting to see the Chinese/US conflict from the other POV I was interested to see what was said in Ball Lightning but not much is really said, even if you ignore the fact they pretty well avoid pointing out who the enemy is. I didn't really get the feeling that anyone had anything in particular against "the enemy", it's so off on the side that the only reason there is even a war is an excuse to try out the weapons. And maybe that was the side effect of the Chinese SF that focuses on the SF element but not so much the consequences on society. I was amused that they won the war by blowing themselves up so badly they scared the crud out of everyone else!

Finally, I guess I didn't mind the translation much. I work with a team in China on our projects on a nearly daily basis and I know their style of writing/speaking is quite different due to the differences in grammar in our respective languages, and I actually almost expected this translation to maintain some of that style a bit. I don't think it did really, but since I was expecting some quirks in the language, I didn't mind if the translation had some quirks. Either way, we're definitely not getting the real experience, since the style is hard to carry over and some references go over our heads (had a few footnotes to help us out there)

I mean there was this one expression about "wooden ducks" which I figured had to be a direct translation from the original Chinese :)

Anyway, now I want to learn more about ball lightning, see if in the past 15 years or so have they figured out what it is.

Andrea wrote: "Actually I have encountered people that think the Moon never appears during the day ... due to their assumption that moon = night..."

We reinforce this with some of our icons, too. Image of sun = daytime, lights. Image of moon = nighttime, darkness.


Andrea wrote: " I didn't really get the feeling that anyone had anything in particular against "the enemy", it's so off on the side that the only reason there is even a war is an excuse to try out the weapons...."

There is an ambivalence toward "the enemy" yet a desire to help the home team win. That is kind of strange, since there is usually a good deal of propaganda during the war to assure everybody that the other guy is evil. In an earlier post I suggested that might be a deliberate distortion in the translation to make the English version more palatable to Americans/Canadians/English. Perhaps if there were passages making the enemy seem evil, it was excised by the translator or English-language publisher (Tor in this case.) It was portrayed as an aggression by the Americans.

Andrea wrote: "I was amused that they won the war by blowing themselves up so badly they scared the crud out of everyone else!..."

In effect they ended up accidentally creating & demonstrating a "doomsday device." That translates into "winning" because "the enemy" was the aggressor. (There was even a mention of a possible landing; It's unimaginable that anyone thinks they could land enough troops in China to defeated it in a land war on its territory. There are 1.4 billion Chinese!


(The main difference between Ball Lightning and Saturn Run is the former has a hot war while the latter a Cold War.)

I don't think anyone's actually starts a war just to try out a new weapon, but if you think you've got the better weapon, it makes you more inclined to start a war you might otherwise not.


Translation is not easy, even for simple works. Trying to maintain the original meaning as well as mood/nuance, As well as producing at least readable if not necessarily lyrical prose.

G33z3r wrote: "There is an ambivalence toward "the enemy" yet a desire to help the home team win. That is kind of strange, since there is usually a good deal of propaganda during the war to assure everybody that the other guy is evil. In an earlier post I suggested that might be a deliberate distortion in the translation to make the English version more palatable to Americans/Canadians/English. Perhaps if there were passages making the enemy seem evil, it was excised by the translator or English-language publisher (Tor in this case.) It was portrayed as an aggression by the Americans."

I'd be disappointed if that were the case, I don't need things sugar coated or politically corrected. In fact, I really wanted to read this to see the other POV. After all Saturn Run was fairly nasty the other way around (not that the Americans came off smelling roses, but the Chinese seemed to be the ones always doing the biggest mess ups which I thought unfair but expected given the target audience). In fact, the only time we get a hint of who the enemy is is when the enemy is winning.

G33z3r wrote: "I don't think anyone's actually starts a war just to try out a new weapon, but if you think you've got the better weapon, it makes you more inclined to start a war you might otherwise not. "

I meant it was a plot device by the author as an excuse to put the weapons to use (and show them fail) rather than the war being integral to the plotline.

On the topic of translations, I read an article about translating the 'Harry Potter' books - which are rendered in a jillion languages. The idea was that translation isn't always a straightforward process, since phrases, words, etc. in English don't always directly translate to other tongues.

There were examples of how this was done in different languages. Interesting.

Translators have to make a judgement call about wording.....and even the 'feel' of a paragraph. I imagine this is especially tricky when translating Chinese to English.

Barbara wrote: "On the topic of translations, I read an article about translating the 'Harry Potter' books - which are rendered in a jillion languages. The idea was that translation isn't always a straightforward ..."

I'm reading Tolkien's notes that went along with his translation of Beowful. Here there's an added challenge that no one knows Old English the way a native speaker would, so they have to guess based on their knowledge of the culture at the time, what the author was trying to get across with his choice of words, etc. While the discussions about "which words is the best match" is a bit boring as I'm not a linguist, the overall historical information about both the time period that Beowulf took place in versus when the author wrote it (he was a Christian writing about the pagan past) is actually kind of interesting. Even just figuring out if a sentence is being literal or is some kind of expression. I definitely understand the difficulties a translator faces now! (or if you try to use Google translate between two languages you know and see the often weird results, it goes way more than understanding just the words)