It did not resonate with me.
So I heard they were making the movie and I read it again, thinking maybe I missed something.
Couldn't find it. So then I start thinking, as is my usual habit, that something must be wrong with me.
I had similar empty feelings about Frank Herbert's Dune. I first read that in high school on the enthusiastic recommendation of friends and an English teacher who was doing her best to engage me in high school. (She was not successful, I quit the following year.)
Some twenty years later, and with a very respectable university degree proclaiming my completion of a requisite number of upper division English classes in addition to my primary degree, I read Dune again. Nope, still nothing. Who are all these people and why should I care?
I read Dune a third time near twenty years after that, hoping maybe six decades of life experience would inform me. It did not. I think it boils down to this: Most science fiction is fantasy. Star Trek isn't going to happen, not in this universe, no more likely that the bespectacled executive assistant who lives next door is actually Supergirl.
It seems to me that ponderous stories like Dune or the 3 Body Problem get bogged down by the pseudo-scientific set decorations. They'd be much livelier with magic instead of science and wizards instead of scientists.
The converse applies as well. One of the reasons I'm reluctant to put three or four hours of my life aside to watch Oppenheimer is my suspicion that he is portrayed as a wizard and the science magic.
I'm not an acolyte of Joseph Campbell. Christopher Nolan claimed he hadn't read Campbell but his movies do fit the frame.
Arthur C. Clarke's claim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is too shifty a foundation to build a heavy tower on.
I did watch Resident Alien. It's not a serious drama about aliens, no more than Strange New Worlds is a serious drama about space exploration. I watched Supergirl too.
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