Adrian Tchaikovsky is really good at these alien ecosystems kind of thing (his Children of * range being quite good). This was a terrific short story. One thing I am curious about is whether there is a different kind of science fiction out there. The driving thread through all of modern English sci-fi is "we shouldn't go out there and do anything; we are the bad that ruins a delicate thing". That's a cool story but somewhat overly tropey at this point I think. This short story, the Avatar series, they have this ecological moralizing. AT is creative enough that the novel ideas (single species life-cycle planet) carry the tale even though the moral thread is the same as the Avatar movie: corporations destroy ecosystems they don't understand in the resource pursuit.
I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?
A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them. In the Three Body Problem, spoilers to follow for the series, humanity aren't The Bad Guys With Agency. We aren't even The Big Bad or The Big Good. We're sort of just other participants in this universe. The dual vector foil is employed by someone else, the guys who want space back from the pocket dimension to reboot the universe are just someone else, everything is someone else. We are bit part players in this play.
This goes on even to a few movies. The Wandering Earth movie (somewhat different from the short story) has this part at the end (obvious spoilers to follow) where the heroes accomplish the task and reboot their Earth Engine after conquering all odds - only for the camera to zoom out and show numerous other teams also having done the same. This wasn't the only struggle won. Cool alternative tale where it isn't so much One Team Saves The World or One Team Ruins The World.
I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?
A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them. In the Three Body Problem, spoilers to follow for the series, humanity aren't The Bad Guys With Agency. We aren't even The Big Bad or The Big Good. We're sort of just other participants in this universe. The dual vector foil is employed by someone else, the guys who want space back from the pocket dimension to reboot the universe are just someone else, everything is someone else. We are bit part players in this play.
This goes on even to a few movies. The Wandering Earth movie (somewhat different from the short story) has this part at the end (obvious spoilers to follow) where the heroes accomplish the task and reboot their Earth Engine after conquering all odds - only for the camera to zoom out and show numerous other teams also having done the same. This wasn't the only struggle won. Cool alternative tale where it isn't so much One Team Saves The World or One Team Ruins The World.