Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to say two recent great first contact novels (showing you can still, in our era, do first contact in an original and intelligent manner) are Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy and Peter Watts' work. I also think many of Charlie Stross' novels fit in there. For example, what they find on the other side of the wormhole modem in Accelerando counts as a "first contact" of sorts... and it is definitely original. C…
>Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy Man... I've been trying to get started on it for months! My eye was caught by it at random in the "New" section of my local library, and then the jacket held me when it said (paraphrased) that it had basically won every Chinese SF award there is. The book was the 2nd of the series, though, and the 1st was checked out... It's been completely checked out every time I've been in a library…
However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare.
On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally).
Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well).
In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read.
Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall.
In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower.
In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
[2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...