I recently tried to suggest a friend read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, and it was fascinating how much of a struggle it was to come up with a convincing argument to read such an extraordinary book. The best reason I could come up with: “It has such cool world-building, and the characters are so dramatically different than the ones in most western fiction novels… you have to read it, man.” It was an endorsement that pales in comparison to the incredible experience of reading the book. I wondered why it’s so easy to talk about and recommend non-fiction books while it’s impossible to capture the essence of good fiction.
Fiction is fundamentally irreducible. Whereas non-fiction is easy to summarize into a few key points, the narrative structure of fiction makes that impossible. If you attempt to summarize fiction, the best you can do is water it down into some platitude that pales in comparison to the underlying novel. Why is that? Perhaps it is because, at its core, all fiction follows an archetypical story — the foundational pattern of all stories are the same. As Paulo Coelho remarked: “Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”
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