From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Nov 09 2002 - 17:52:55 MST
Just discovered this series. I lucked up on book two
- The Broken Wheel - for $1 at the OCSFS meeting.
Figured it was probably some silly kung foo movie in
print, but as I hadn't seen any SF that really took a
Chinese perspective, I grabbed it anyway and was very
pleasantly surprised.
The Broken Wheel captures perfectly my own experience
of dealing with ethnic Chinese for over a decade on a
daily basis. For example, the utter substitution of
"face" for reality. The Han, in this future of their
choosing, have literally erased history - no WWI, no
WWII, no Cold War, no internet - the new history has
them taking over Europe much earlier than all that.
Anything that might indicate otherwise is banned
ruthlessly. Rape, torture, cruel death and a constant
unravelling of infinitely complex plottings and
treachery are right out of the classic Chinese novels.
Furthermore, it takes the Confucian, Han Chinese
culture and weltanshauung and precisely poses it
against the Western opposite in a time span of
centuries in a future in which the Han have completely
subjugated the entire planet (and solar system). The
Singularity has been forstalled by the Han
determination to stop the wheel of changes.
Yet their very attempt to halt change has introduced
its own instabilities. Some of the old banned
knowledge is reemerging in the face of the age old
problem - who guards the guards? New, totally
unpredicted philosophical, political, economic,
technological forces are emerging and the total rulers
are helpless, even as they fail to see the danger.
Highly entertaining and culturally, technoligically
realistic future...
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:02 MST