My memory has always been the Sargasso Sea of storage devices, but I got a disturbingly concrete reminder of this a few days ago.
Like many of you (probably) I enjoyed Cixin Liu's trilogy The Three-Body Problem. So when I saw that Amazon had made a series out of it I headed right over. It turned out to be 30 episodes long, which seemed reasonable for a three-volume set. But no: it's 30 episodes for just the first book. Yikes. It's also in Chinese. That's OK too, but fair warning: the subtitles come and go pretty quickly. Pay attention.
Anyway, I finished watching it a few days ago. My verdict: OK, but not great, and boy did they take a lot of liberties with the book. So many liberties, in fact, that I was prompted to reread the novel.
So I did. And it turns out they took no liberties at all. It was the most literal page-by-page adaptation I've ever seen. And yet my memory told me completely differently. This is for a book I read only five or six years ago.
Meh. I'd like to gripe that this is the price of getting old, but I've always been like this. It's a wonder I remember how to get out of bed in the morning.
Six years is a chunk of time. This is novelist Ian McEwan on forgetting novels and rereading:
"So I read a lot of fiction, too, partly as rereading. You carry around these opinions of books you've ready 40 years ago - you remember nothing about it except your opinion, and it's great to reread. Unless a work of fiction is very, very short, it's very hard to hold the structure in your mind, anyway because on your first reading everything is unfolding like life - it is the book of life - but a rereading gives you the architecture of the book. So that's a pleasure but I still read new fiction." - Ian McEwan speaking with physicist Lawrence Krauss on his Origins podcast.
There's a reason why, when something happens, people ought to write it down immediately. If we (humans) don't, our brains will make up details that didn't exist. You have, at most, a couple of hours before the details start to change.
Whenever I have to make a police report for an incident I witnessed and called 911 to report, I immediately write down the details, just in case I'm called in to testify as a witness to a grand jury and then later during a trial. Yeah, I have testified to a grand jury before.
+1
What are you doing talking to my wife?
(๑•﹏•)
"You have, at most, a couple of hours before the details start to change."
If you happen to be Biden.
If there is a dramatic event, details can be forgotten well before 2 hours but if ordinary event than for the majority of people beyond 2 hours will be fine for most details.
if you're trump, you never have to remember details since you're just gonna make up lies about it anyway
Ha ha ha! Burn!
I gave up on The Three Body Problem about halfway through the first book. It isn't that it's bad; I'm the wrong one to ask whether or not it's good or bad. It's that it's not at all my type of book. It's almost entirely an exercise in world building and puzzle solving. The characters are thin, and exist mostly to serve as tools for the problem solving.
I love puzzle stories and I don't mind shallow-characterization in the service of telling them. The problem is length. Puzzle stories with thinly drawn characters are the stuff and staple of classic Astounding SF. But once you transition from the short story to a somewhat longer form, well.
That's something a lot people don't get when they're disappointed by, say Philip Roth. Or Robert Heinlein if it's old-timey sf which does it for ya.
That’s too bad. Because a bit after halfway through the first book is when they drop the puzzle solving entirely for the rest of the series and switch to thriller-ish
I agreed at the start. The computer game thing was dragging on forever, but I stuck with it and now it’s one of my favorite series. But I have a strong bias for sci fi so take it with a grain of salt
Worth another try if you have the heart for it!
My memory has always sucked too, which is nice in that I can usually dismiss what might be age-related memory loss to "oh that's just me." Lately, though, I've noticed the portion of my brain that I thought was permanently devoted to state capitals seems to crumbling around the edges.
What I really wanted to say though was that this bad memory seems to run in my family. I've been told my grandmother used to mark public library books with two, very faint vertical lines under the first letter of the title to ensure she didn't check it out again later.
I get it. My favorite book, which I reread about a dozen years ago, is War and Peace and i remember very little -- other than, at the end, the whale dies.
I literally laughed out loud at this.
+1
Lol!
I can rewatch a movie or reread a book, never knowing what happens next, until the scene unfolds, and then I go "Oh, yeah, I remember that now."
I read the book and am slowly slogging thru the Amazon adaptation -- I have to think the Chinese Actors' Union offers their members' services at a far lower rate than SAG based upon the pace of the series. I'm not entirely certain the series would make any sense without having read the book beforehand.
In some ways, you're in luck as Netflix will be releasing an English adaptation next month which offers "Netflix's version expands the story to an international cast and takes liberties to adapt the dense and physics-heavy novel for a mainstream audience." I'm assuming that's code for more nudity & explosions.
I get to hide my own Easter eggs.
I just read the imdb synopsis for the English language version and noticed this:
"An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth."
My recollection from the book is that this civilization was anything but "on the brink of destruction" so I have to assume the good folks at Netflix are cranking the drama up to 11 rather than closely following the books.
Doesn't Amazon Prime have dubbing in alternate languages, like Netflix does? I've reached the stage where I switch on the English (if available) and also the English closed captioning.
The problem with doing both is that often the words don’t exactly match
Like the dub will say “what are you doing” and the sub will say “what are you up to”
Breaks your brain a little
I thought the book sucked, but I can't remember why...
I don’t think your memory sucks so much as this is how we remember things. To some extent we do remember facts and figures like a computer. However, my feeling is that with complex things like stories we continually process them in our minds. It is as if we are processing the mere events into a deeper narrative that can be more important to us than just the cold facts.
After all, the important aspect of a book or movie or relationship is not just the set of facts that make up the tale, the important aspect is the deeper parts that we have trouble putting into words. Maybe we sometimes just mangle the story without getting much more out of it. Sometimes we distill it down into deeper meaning and truth.
I’m surprised you liked it so much. I’m not much of a sci fi reader though. I did love a couple of Andy weir books.
I felt like this book had a couple of interesting ideas but too much handwaving and things just kind of happening almost magically.
Memory like this is funny. I would remember hardly any details--beyond the big picture stuff-- about a novel I read six years ago. Meanwhile, my adult son has an amazing ability to remember plot points, but has no memory for authors' names (Rowling is about the only author he could tell you he read for sure).