The Dark Forest

This book is a mess. On one hand it is full of amazing ideas. On the other hand the execution (writing and explanation) is lacking sense of reality. I was hooked the entire second half of this book but to experience the cosmic horror I had to force myself through the boring first half.

Book is split into three parts and it also felt like the first part was translated by someone else or at least long before the other two. Prose was dry and boring. It may be that it was actually Liu Cixin who wrote it that way but even then a great translator could make it better.

And then there's the weird stuff. Like half an hour long detour about how author's made up characters can get lives of their own in author's mind. It was a slow 90° turn from the story coming out of nothing and ridiculous. Would be a great short story, though. I had a feeling that it was crucial for the later part in the book and I was right. But nevertheless it was weird and the romance could have been written differently, better, less silly.
Da Shi had to be abducted and replaced by a clone because he's nothing like Da Shi in the first book. While I never liked him his cynicism seems to have gone away and that was the only interesting thing about him.

Some of the ideas here are truly astonishing. But I find it hard to believe that politicians are this... naive? Selfless? Uncorrupted?
All of the above. I guess a Chinese author needs to have certain perspective otherwise he won't get published. There was much less CCP propaganda here but it was still present in unnecessary details like asking to create a Wallfacer base in the same spot CCP used to push back Nationalists. That's like a hero of German novel taking place in 2200 would ask to use Hitler's bunker because it was Hitler's and somehow that was a cool nostalgic thing to do.

My biggest pet peeve is that people here aren't people, they're tools to tell the pseudo-scientific ideas that make up the foundation of this series. Boy does the Dark Forest as solution to Fermi's paradox scare me. But the behavior of people, especially the escapists, often doesn't make sense. They are two dimensional embodiments of their ideas instead of fully developed three dimensional characters. This also made it difficult to get through the part one of the book.

But from then on it only got better and better despite the characters because the ideas finally started to develop and author handled them exceptionally well towards the end (except the ending). To get into them is to spoil stuff. But I was promised cosmic horror and I got it in one of the best forms I've come across.

Shame the ending was weird and hasty. Suddenly everything changes just like that? When I think about it it sure is possible. But it would require more than five pages for me to be okay with this conclusion. It's too simplistic. And that's the case with everything that doesn't work in this book. Either it's waved by a hand simple and therefore takes me out of immersion or it's incredibly thought through and makes me happy I did not give up on this series.

I'd love to give this book 5 stars but I can't because of the first slow half and the ending. But second half is solid 5/5.