At the same time, this short story kicks off with a bang to be equal parts horrible, nasty, and cruel... and winds up being poetic justice. :)Very enjoyable short. Hard-SF in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke at his most cruel and devastating, written by China's very own Clarke. Please don't mistake me, however. This is all kinds of wild. Trapping the Earth, very powerful aliens give us the option to become cattle, giving us happy lives until we're 60 before we become food. Our planet, however, is go...

My first story by this highly acclaimed Chinese author and I quite liked it.Earth has a Space Force protecting it from rocks that would otherwise impact and endanger humanity. One day, they encounter a crystal, the memory of an already destroyed civilisation, which warns them of the Devourer.As alien menaces go, I thought this was extremely civilized. As was Earth's response (up to a point). *lol*Nevertheless, a sort of war is unavoidable. However, even that war is quite different from what I'm

A morning coffee read. I am starting to think that I should read more short stories. This probably loses quite a lot in translation, there are some clunky phrases that seem more reminiscent of 1950' scifi. I don't think the translation truly pulled off the Captain's character but we certainly see what was being tried to portray. There were parts where I rolled my eyes and there were parts where I sat back and reflected what I had just read. It gave a unique and fascinating story to the history o...

Free here: http://www.you-books.com/book/L-Cixin...An amusing little story. Dialogues feel a bit clunky possibly due to translation. Some interesting and original concepts and mounds of irony. Recommended.

Devourer was another interesting short story from Liu Cixin, but it’s not one of my favourites. In fact, this was a rounded-up two-point-five-star rating and not a full three-star rating.Although the story pulled me in and had me curious to see how all the pieces would come together, I wanted a lot more from this one. There were plenty of things introduced that could have been explored deeper, and I feel a lot of this was surface level and never taken as far as it could have been.All in all, thi...

Probably the most exotic and really, really unique take on an space war I've ever encountered in this short story. Or at least in a while, if that word "ever" seems too strong. Now I can't tell you almost anything without spoilers, but while it's just an ordinary sci-fi in terms of plot, the weapons of that war ant the true nature of the enemies... That was something! Highly recommend.

One of my favorites of Liu Cixin's works. Multi-fold plots, one after another, keep surprising you, even after you think the ending is doomed.There's a sequel to this novel, Nebula of Poems, but unlikely available to you English readers unfortunately, because it's too much language dependent (full of Chinese ancient poems). After everything is set, Fangs brings a worm poet to visit their overlord. The visit ends up with a total disaster to the devourer's world...

This short novel is a real gem, it's a fun and thought provoking read from an interesting and obviously skilled Chinese author. It's been translated beautifully because there were no hints of translation at all that I could detect. The story details themselves are relatively standard sci-fi ideas, but it's the 'human' aspect that impressed me, and Liu presents humanity interestingly in the light of the alien invaders. I was a little reminded of the work of John Scalzi and his Old Man's War unive...

This short story pretty much exemplifies both the merits and the faults of Liu Cixin's better-known trilogy (starting with the The Three-Body Problem); if you read this first there's really no need to subject yourself to those three long-drawn-out books.The merits are originality and ruthlessness; the faults - frequent disregard of physics while paying a good deal of lip service to it, blatant sexism, stilted characterization, forced representation of the humanity via the very few unreasonably h...

A fantastic short story, simple but yet thought-provoking. They cannot translate this guy's stuff fast enough for me!

Another silly alien invasion story and another failure of storytelling by this author. Apart from the somewhat entertaining climax, the rest of this was a series of events every sci-fi reader has experienced dozens of times and undoubtedly seen executed better than this. The characters were grating and unbelievable while the plot was basic and silly. However, what really cemented this in the 1-star category was the awful ending. My brain can hardly comprehend how stupid and contrived it was. I j...

A great short read from Liu Cixin, about an alien species travelling the Milky Way, raiding planets of their water and minerals to keep their generation ship going. This bears quite a few of the hallmarks of Liu's writing style. Incomprehensible aliens, humanity's futile attempts to defend from a threat that they cannot fully understand, large time-scales, and a human protagonist that thinks outside the box when compared to the mob mentality. In this case, a seemingly cold-hearted army major who...

Didn’t see it becoming philosophical at some point. But I’m pleasantly surprised and intrigued to read more chinese sci-fi now.

A great book from a author which got me interested in his other work.The story itself tells the story of humankind faced with imminent doom and how we handle it. It has a perfect length and tells exactly what it needs to.It also got a cool twist at the end and i enjoyed it a lot.

A really cool short story with some wild as fuck twists and turns, that felt more like a whole novel compressed in roughly 70 pages. The overt militarism kinda spoiled my good impression, though.

This was the point in the collection that I realized there were going to be callbacks to previous stories.The big reveal of the origin of the Devourers was spoiled pretty hard by Fangs and his speech about the ants.I do not enjoy Cixin’s recurring theme in his works that feminine traits are the downfall of society (the Eridanians; I mean even their avatar is a genki anime girl 🤦🏻‍♀️) and that aggression is the solution and only means of survival.I did appreciate that victory was really not achie...

Another alien invasion. This time a giant tyre in space, crewed by dinosaurs, out to loot the Earth. Cool.

Could have been a lot better. Not as gripping as some other of his stories, but not as bad as Curse 5.0

A short book, compared to the others of Liu Cixin. Unfortunately i have read the Three Body problem trilogy of the writer at first of all his others which set a high bar of expectation. When i came to the story it seemed pretty funny story and upto a level very probable story line. But then again as time went on the pages of this small book, chapters and chapters were revealing a magnitude of twists and turns, seemingly covering a lot of concepts as a whole clogging the mind, and as usual the en...

What is civilisation? Civilisation is devouring, ceaselessly eating, endlessly expanding. Everything else comes second.