The Dark Forest

The book starts off from the perspective of an ant, which was certainly neat but it went on endlessly and after a while I just found it irritating. This turned out to predicate how I would feel about the rest of the book in general.
We then learn a strange new fact about the aliens: they cannot lie or deceive nor do they even understand the concept of deception. This tidbit becomes the crux of the book: how can you use deception to defeat the incoming aliens and their superior technology. Again, neat but ultimately irritating.

For mostly inexplicable reasons, the UN decides to give infinite resources to four people to deceive the aliens who are watching them, giving the hope of humanity to these people without ever knowing what they're up to. Oh and they can live for 400 years through cryotech that apparently exists now. Also, for equally logical reasons, thinking about leaving the planet is against the law. Also the entire book is 600 pages and only 4 chapters.
I enjoy a challenging read as much as anyone (maybe more), but the only thing this challenged was my patience.

The book leaves plotlines dangling all over the place, takes tangents such as 20 pages about a guy's imaginary girlfriend, and takes leaps of logic that are frankly ridiculous.

After the first book, this was an enormous disappointment. The unique combination of cutting edge science, revolutionary history and philosophy in the first book hooked me, despite some issues I had with characters and plot direction. This book has none of that, but instead inflates all the author's shortcomings by focusing on the author's Socialogical ideas and theories of what an apocalypse would look like. They are not good.
According to the author, there seems to be only two types of people in the world: nihilistic geniuses and idiots. That shallow philosophy should not be 600 pages long.
I gave up after 130 pages, and that's really upsetting because I thought this would be my next favourite sci-fi series. Oh well, better books await...