Review: A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu

A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was provided and audio ARC of this book via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.  I did enjoy the narrator, he did a good job with the voice acting for the fictional works.

If you are a fan of the author's work, this is a nice compilation of fiction and non-fiction short stories and essays that he has written over his career from various publications.    I would not recommend this as a starting point for the author's work if you are a new reader.  This complication includes a mix of short stories tied to novels he has written, complete standalone short stories, and essays and interviews composed for magazines and other outlets.  I have previously only read the Remembrance of Earth's Past series (Three Body Problem) and was able to follow along with his writing style, which I do enjoy.   

The author has very particular opinions on sci-fi and expresses them in his essays.  You also have to keep in mind that many of the works are translated, and there is often something lost in the translation of a work because the translator will put their own "spin" on things.  If this is where you start with the author's writing, I can see a new reader to his work being turned off by this  compilation of interviews, essays, and short fiction.  This is a more thought provoking insight into his life and works and how he sees science and science fiction based on his experiences.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the fictional short stories, but the addition of the non-fiction essays felt a bit disjointed.  I feel like it should have been all essays or all short stories, I thought it was all short fiction but I misread the synopsis.  There was no flow between the fiction and the non-fiction, at least in the audio version.  Perhaps in the print book, where you can pick the book up and put it down between stories and articles it makes more sense to compile the book in this way.   

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