Destination: Jupiter

Post by qingcharles » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

dcminter wrote: post #38

jajko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech/fantasy parts are great and were novel back then. But the characters were shallow, story so-so and ended in big meh, and overal it feels like chinese propaganda re freedom and future. Any non-chinese character is evil for example, only chinese will inherit the right for their future. Western culture moved from such properly bad cliches long time ago for the better.

The opening scene of the first novel during the cultural revolution I recall as being absolutely fantastic. The rest of that novel was a big rather dull Asimovian deus ex, and then the rest of the series was more of that. Big disappointment, very much not what I think of as hard sci-fi which is what it often gets billed as, and I absolutely do not get the love for it here. Don't get me wrong, there's some total dross…

Post by ahazred8ta » Thu, Jun 05, 2025, 6:39 PM UTC

nwlotz wrote: post #20

zabzonk wrote: post #6

Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.

There's a fantastic Ray Bradbury short story from 1948 called "Jonah and the Jove-Run" that I hardly see referenced anywhere. It's about Jupiter being the next frontier after colonizing Mars and the complexity of navigating the asteroid belt on supply runs. It's a great quick read. Though it hardly attempts the sort of scientific justification as in The Three-Body Problem.