melannen | (no subject)

Ugh, cold, please go away.

ON the other hand I have gotten ahead in my reading. Does anybody have recs for a good young adult or elementary novel to pair with The Three-Body Problem? Goblin Emperor and Castle Hangnail turned out scarily well-matched so far (When the castle loses its master, the young people who were the last heirs anyone would expect must take possession; prove themselves to the courtiers and the locals; overcome histories of abuse, seriously inadequate educations, and their own natural inclinations toward kindness and mercy; and build bridges both literal and metaphorical in order to bring peace and prosperity to the surrounding lands as the courtiers struggle to find their place under the new regime.)

Anyway so now I need one to pair with "The Three-Body Problem" but I'm coming up unexpectedly blank? It's apparently about a planned alien invasion and people on Earth (mostly scientists and government) scrambling to figure out how they are going to respond.

The closest I've got in my unread YA shelves at home is "Freddy the Pig and the Baseball Team from Mars" which I suspect is not a very good equivalent, but then I have been surprised before.

Anyway I didn't expect to be this stumped but the library's catalog isn't giving me much for YA novels about alien invasions either. I guess all the dystopias lately are homegrown Earth dystopias. Any suggestions?

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I've heard good things about Mars Evacuees, which is teens getting sent to Mars to get out of the way of an alien invasion of Earth, but haven't read it yet.

Mars Evacuees sounds fun! I will keep it in mind, thank you.

I seem to recall that Garth Nix's Shade's Children dealt with an alien invasion. It was just set a while after the initial invasion. It's a very dark book, and, if I'm recalling correctly, a lot of people die.

Oh, thank you! I think Three-Body Problem is more post-invasion than pre-invasion but it might do.

The YA alien invasion novel that immediately comes to mind is The True Meaning of Smekday (definitely recommended!) but I can't speak to how well it would correspond with The Three Body Problem, not having read that book. Dangerous by Shannon Hale is also YA about alien invasion but I personally found that book too upsetting so I rec it with reservations.

I have read The True Meaning of Smekday! Also recommend. I guess I could count "finally watching Home" as my paired YA, but I kind of want to work on reading more new stuff. Hmm.

Dangerous actually looks like it'd be a reasonably good plot match but the reviews are. um. not great. I will keep it in mind! Thank you.

My other thought is that you could choose a YA book about colonialism, because that's alien invasion, only with the other definition of alien.

I would totally be up for other interpretations of "alien invasion".

Hmm. Probably there are Rosemary Sutcliff novels that would work for this, but I don't think any of the ones that I've read so far. Wiki seems to indicate The Shield Ring as being promising, it being about resistance to the Norman Conquest.

Also from what I've read of Rudyard Kipling you can probably find something relevant about British colonization of India. From what I remember of Kim it might do.

The Trickster's Choice/Trickster's Queen duology is about native people working to kick white people out of their country which they'd colonized. (...of course, the native people rebellion is led by a Special White Girl so there's that.)

Journey to the River Sea, maybe? I always have some issues with Ibbotson and this one is no different (hello romanticization of the native peoples) but overall this one's pretty good. Set in Brazil and in part about tensions between the white colonizers and the native people during the era of booming rubber-tree business.

Idk, I think YA about colonialism might be just as hard to find good and useful examples of as YA about alien invasion.

Or I can take alien invasion in a different direction and suggest Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, in which the aliens would really like to be allowed to stop invading and go home, thanks.

I was going The True Meaning of Smekday, which is a book I recommend universally!

Adaptation, by Malinda Lo?
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13614147-adaptation?from_search=true&search_version=service_impr

Oh, thanks! Malinda Lo has been on my "you should get around to reading someday" list for awhile, that one looks interesting.

3BP is designed to pair with a Heinlein juvenile. Perhaps Red Planet or Space Cadet?

I have read both of those! And Star Beast, which was my first thought. Would Starship Troopers or Have Spacesuit, Will Travel work? I never did get around to either of those.

Not Starship Troopers, but possibly Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. But read Starship Troopers anyway when you get the chance. Probably also Revolution in 2100, which I read as a teenager though it's not usually considered in the class of Heinlein Juvenile per se.

Revolution in 2100 is the one that's in the big Future History anthology brick, isn't it? The revolt against Scudder? I read everything in that one repeatedly as a teenager. ^_^ (I have read most of Heinlein, there are just small holes here and there.)

Yup, that's the one. I'm looking forward to what you think of 3BP... the Heinlein influence is very obvious if you've read Future History and the juveniles.

Huh, interesting! So far I'm forty pages in and there hasn't been any SF elements yet so I'm mostly comparing it to nonfiction I've been reading about that period in China (by which of course I mean

tenyearsapeasant).

I'm convinced that the heading of the first section "The Madness Years" is a callback to Heinlein Future History "The Crazy Years" that Ken Liu mistranslated. And that Cixin Liu is deliberately analogizing Mao to Scudder.

Having read 3BP, I now firmly concur with the thread above which suggests Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. They will do cool thematic things together, and Have Spacesuit is an interesting book with some subsurface oddities.

Well, that's two votes for Have Spacesuit by people who've actually read 3BP! We may have a winner.

...it would also work for the "finish books you started and then put down" resolution; I read about twenty pages of it once on a rainy day from a campsite lending library as a teenager and never got my hands on it again after that.

Andrea Host's And All The Stars? YA alien invasion (plucky band of misfit Australian teens end up hiding out together, form super-tight cohort, save day with copious Three Musketeers references) and, uh, well, while I've not read Three-Body Problem, there's definitely ... a problem of bodies ...

I think the bodies in Three-Body Problem are rather more abstract and/or symbolic, although I.. could be wrong... I'm about 15% of the way in and still don't really know what it's about.

That books sounds interesting though, that you!

The Three Body Problem in the title is an allusion to the famous Newtonian physics problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem

There's actually very little abstract/symbolic meaning to the title.

If you want to go very old-school, John Christopher's When the Tripods Came might work well, especially since, like in TBP, it involves the aliens sneaking in secretly - it starts by them brainwashing people with a TV show.

That is also one I have already read! I read it a long long time ago though - I don't remember the TV show at all.

Well, technically the one I recced is a prequel - maybe you only read the Tripod trilogy? I think the prequel is the least interesting of the bunch, but it also has the most parallels with The Three-Body Problem.