RaveThe London Review of Books...one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written ... The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research ... New technology and the science behind it are always well explained (though never boringly) by Cixin. The best bits in his books are set pieces that would be hallucinatory, or surreal, were it not that everything is described with such scientific authority ... Cixin’s view of the universe as a dark forest may be pessimistic, but his view of humanity and its future is extremely optimistic. We are not in the end times: we are babies at the foot of a long staircase. We will develop superhard nanomaterials that will allow us to build an elevator to space. We will develop rockets powered by nuclear fusion that will take us way beyond the Oort cloud. One day we will be capable of building ring-shaped artificial planets that produce their own gravitational fields. We will live in houses shaped like leaves that dangle from the branches of enormous artificial trees; we won’t carry mobile phones or smart devices since any surface can be turned into an information screen at will. Cixin constantly reminds us of our technological infancy by imagining civilisations that are way ahead of us, lighting the path.
Michael Pollan
MixedHarper\'sToward the end of the book [Pollan] declares himself more agnostic about mystical matters than he was before he experimented on himself, though it’s not clear that the drugs have really given him grounds for changing his convictions. The great claims he makes for the benefits of mystical experience seem to be based more on the testimony of others than on his own peregrinations ... Pollan gives a lively account of the rise, fall, and rise again of psychedelic research.
