Review by oldmansimms - The Wandering Earth

A review by oldmansimms
The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu

3.0

In my review of Liu's last translated collection, To Hold Up the Sky, I poked fun at his tendency to seemingly just think of a cool science idea and contort a story around it, with little thought to the characters, dialogue, or details aside from that science idea, and his fixation on certain concepts repeatedly (like higher dimensions, apocalyptic events, hostile aliens, and suspended animation). That's all back again, here. I haven't read enough of classic SF authors like Clarke and Asimov to say for sure but I get a similar vibe, where writing a fully fleshed out story just isn't the point, and honestly reading Liu is kind of a hate-read situation for me -- there's some interesting sciencey bits but the weakness of everything around those really drags the stories down. So, I decided to make a game of it, and review the individual stories by playing Liu Cixin Bingo! Some of it's kind of cheating, like "Monologuing about Societal/Technological History" and "People Shouting Complicated Things in Unison" also counting as "Stilted Unnatural Dialogue", but oh well.

The Wandering Earth