Sri Lanka - Pilgrim Machines - Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

 

Yudhanjaya's 2nd science fiction book, ordered as soon as I could and pretty much delivered on its release date, can't wait to jump into this one!

China - The Redemption of Time - Baoshu

Being a massive Three Body Problem trilogy fan I was shocked to discover I had missed this book. It's a fan fiction book that sits after The Dark Forest, chronologically. 

Baoshu's book was approved by Cixin Liu and is incredibly popular, which adds to my frustration that I didn't find this sooner (Jan 2024). But as soon as I saw someone mention it online, I purchased a copy via my local bookstore.

Taiwan - The City Trilogy - Hsi-kuo Chang

12th June 2023:

Purchased the book after a twitter recommendation. Took a few weeks to arrive but arrived today.

11th August 2023:

Read the first 4 chapters of book 1 (Five Jade Rings). I started with the translators notes and some of the history of Hsi-kuo Chang, and it was really dry and dull, and didn't hold up much hope for the book. I was also thinking it was going to be more fantasy rather than sci fi, from the titles of the books. The physical book was a little intimidating too, long chapters each page was pretty big with a LOT of lines per page and a lot of words per line. All this filled me with dread and automatically put me on the back foot. 

But after reading the prologue, I was totally hooked. The prologue alone was an epic story of a ginormous bronze statue that overshadowed the 'City' that the trilogy is all about! 

Philippines - Tablay - Katrina F. Olan

I can't remember why I picked the Philippines as a country to search for science fiction authors, especially as my plan was to tick off the 4 home countries of the UK, and then move onto the rest of Europe. But anyway after a few searches I did find a few selections of short stories from the Philippines, that looked OK, but I much prefer a full novel over a short story.

Tablay appeared in one of my searches and looked exciting, and the write ups and promotional bits and bobs reminded me of the Pacific Rim movie, which I thought was a great movie.

I found the book's Facebook page and contacted them to see if they had stockists in the UK, but they didn't. I did have some really nice chats with the author who was super enthusiastic about her book. So I thought this avenue was closed and started looking to other countries to find another book.

 

After a couple of weeks I noticed a post on Facebook that Tablay was now being stocked in an independent book store in Baguio, in the Philippines call Mt Cloud. I contacted them about international delivery. They couldn't have been more helpful, and even suggested a second book of short sci-fi stories from another Filipino author. So I ordered a couple of books and paid for delivery to the UK. The books arrived in less than week.

Tablay is a great book, felt like it was probably more aimed at younger readers in its style and its content. But it is a super easy read, and a real page turner. It's exciting and builds and builds, with some neat twists and turns. 

The book ticks off some of the reasons I started this project, it deals with Filipino folk law and has a fair few lines of conversation in Filipino too, but you can understand roughly the meaning in the context of the conversation. So I'm super glad I picked this book, and look forward to the other Filipino book I ordered!

Korea (South) - Tower - Bae Myung-Hoon.

Korean, sci series and films have been on my playlist for ages now. With such greats as  Squid games, Train to Busan, Parasite and snowpiercer I though there would be a glut of South Korean sci fi books translated into English. But it was quite a struggle to find sci fi books. Maybe they focus on writing film and TV scripts, rather than novels. Who knows, but Bae Myung-Hoon's name kept popping up, and to be honest, the cover artwork for Tower pushed me in to buying the book.

I'm usually heavily put off when a book is listed as 'a collection of stories'. I want to read a 200+ page book, where I get invested in the characters and the story. Short stories, usually have nice ideas, but always leave me want to know much more detail and depth. However, this book had a central character, and this was the 647 story building that was commonplace in the 6 (slightly connected) stories that happen inside the building. The stories are great 30-50 pages in length each, so just enough for some detail and time to get invested in liking (or disliking) the main characters. Some odd concepts for a future living in a building large enough to be considered its own country, but really enjoyable and a very easy read. I guess I don't know enought about Korean history or politics to know how satirical the book is, but there were some clear digs at incompetent leadership in government and the military. So this did tick some huge boxes for this project, and reminded me of other South Korean TV and film, in the way it deals with class culture and elitist powerful groups.

Sri Lanka - The Salvage Crew - Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

 

Sri Lanka was just a random country I picked after I heard that a mate had been there on holiday. The Salvage Crew popped up straight away, and got ordered within minutes. The story and characters had nothing to do with Sri Lanka but I don't mind. I've found a really cool book with loads of stuff I love about sci fi. A grumpy, weather worn AI ship, who leads the rest of the crew on a tough thankless mission. 

The book had some really really cool ideas, and I was really drawn to ideas of language and poetry leading the way in civilisation and advancement. 
 

Japan - Legends of the Galactic Heroes (02: Ambition) - Yoshiki Tanaka 

Still sitting on the To Be Read pile.

 Japan - Legends of the Galactic Heroes (01: Dawn) - Yoshiki Tanaka 

I only discovered this book because of reading The Dark Forest as this book was refenced in the translators foot notes. It also was the next step in expanding my library of Sci-fi from around the world. I was given this book and Ambition (the second book in the series) These are nice short books and a welcome releif from the rather large and heavy books in The Three-Body Problem series.

The story itself was great, with crazy German names and titles that seemed to be plucked out of a Tolstoy novel. The book was super easy to read and a wonderful simplicity to this futurist world of battles that seemed to be re-enactments of classic Napoleonic battles, just played out with laser beams and spacecraft.

When I got the first two books, i had a quick look to see how many other books there are in the series. There are TEN! I now have two books in a series of ten sitting on my bookshelf. I can't cope with that. I need to buy the other eight! I'm going to use this series of books as a breather between some of the more heavy and 'chewy' books that I have lined up in my ever growing list of Sci-fi from around the world

China - Death's End - Liu Cixin

There was no pause between putting The Dark Forest and picking up Death's end. I was excited to see where the story went and how it could possibly end. I was slight worried as Death's End had the same translator as The Three-Body Problem and found the translators footnotes a little distracting. But footnotes were very infrequent and only used to explain nuances in the Chinese language and puns that only work in Chinese, so in this book they did add to the depth of the writing style.

I was also concerned that the previous two books slowly built up to introducing new concepts and jaw dropping moments. But this book was packed with full blow WTF moments chapter after chapter. Also the chapter were much shorter in this book. I think shorter chapters always engage me more. I think; "that was only a short chapter, I'll read another one". I read this book faster than each of the two prior books even though this book was much longer. I didn't just pick up this book for 30 minutes in bed before nodding off, I went to bed an hour early so I could read more of it!

The concepts in the third book were just as incredible as the rest of the books in the series, and concepts brought up in the first and second book were neatly tied up also. The third book was outstanding. It is one of my favorite Sci-fi books of all time. It is quite a commitment of time and effort to read all three of the books, and you really can't read them out of sequence or just pick a single book to read. 

It is this series of books that inspired me to expand my reading of Sci-fi to authors outside of England and USA. I quickly realised when looking at my bookshelves, that the cultural heritage of the authors were predominately English and American. Am I missing out on an entire world of Sci-fi? Let's find out!

China - The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin

The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin

After the fast paced finale of The Three-Body Problem it was a little frustrating for the second book in the series to slow things back down, and retell parts of the first book from different view points. But the story really started to pick up pace in the second half, introducing some amazing concepts once again.

I was totally hooked on the second book and massively invested in the fate of the earth and the alien civilisation. At this point there was no way I wasn't going to buy the third and final book and have it lined up to start as soon as I finished book number 2.

The translators footnotes were not as frequent in the book either, which I (wrongly) assumed was due to a different translator. However one of the translators footnotes pointed out that 2 of the characters were talking about a fictional character. The translator pointed out the fictional characters were referencing a commander in a Japanese series of books called Legend of the Galactic Heroes which I put on my wish list for the family Secret Santa (gratefully my Secret Santa purchased me the first 2 books in the series).

As soon as the book finished it was straight onto Death's End for the final instalment of this epic saga.

China - The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin

This book was a gift from my son who had heard about in one podcast / YouTube channels he watches. I was excited to read a Sci-fi book from China, as China's history and politics is so different from my home country of England. And when a book comes with praise from former President Barack Obama, you're probably in for a treat.

I did find the book a little slow to start, but I found the history of China's cultural revolution an interest backdrop to the characters. But the book really started to gain momentum when the alien civilisation was introduced. The concept of having an alien civilisation, arriving to destroy earth in 400 years was just amazing. I love this simple and more 'believable' concept of an alien invasion.

The book really picks up the pace in the final third of the book, introducing some incredible concepts and ideas. Earths ensuing crises and defense ideas are equally incredible as the alien ones. It's hard to talk about the book without crossing over on to the second and third books as they have started to merge in my memory.

Either way, I can't recommend this book highly enough. Really enjoy the concepts. I can't really comment on the merits of the writting, but I found easy to read and very compelling. One slight distraction was the amount of translator's note, in places these broke up the flow of the story, as I was looking up the foot notes. Don't get me wrong, there were interesting and informative, but didn't always add anything to the story.