The Dark Forest
Ratings748
Average rating4.3
Characters: ★★ Atmosphere: ★★★★★ Writing Style: ★★★ Plot: ★★★ Intrigue: ★★★ Relationships: ★★★ Enjoyment: ★★★Rating: ★★★The Dark Forest struggles with the same issues as its predecessor but ends on a high note.We continue our story throughout the next few hundred years with humanity trying desperately to come up with a plan to defend themselves against the ominous Trisolarans. In this second book, I found the plot lagging along and suffered from a distinct lack of dehydration. We primarily follow Luo Ji, a sexist astronomer who has never felt true love. It's fine to have an unlikable character, but nearly all of the characters in The Dark Forest are hard to read about. We spend far too long learning about Luo Ji's creation of his dream woman and his visions of her throughout the story. He even goes so far as to use government funding to find a real version of her, a woman who somehow is okay with all this and is happy to marry and have a child with him.It's not just Luo Ji who is unlikable. All of the Wallfacers are stiff, self-involved, and apparently unable to come up with even an inkling of a plan to save humanity without mass murdering the very people they're aiming to protect. I found this a little unimaginative and lazy. I also found the use of time-jumping with cryostasis a bit convenient to move the plot along. We enter the future where everything has been progressing along, but no further progress was attempted towards the Wallfacer project. No new Wallfacers of later generations were assigned, and humanity has mostly become overconfident that they'll beat the Trisolarans when they arrive. We really believe no other attempts would be made? The ETO just dissolved?It was hard to read the droplet scene. Not because it was horrific and graphic, but because I cannot believe that humanity as a whole anticipated this droplet for 200 years and once it arrived they assumed that it was friendly? It was sent 200 years ago, when humanity was even less of a threat. I would have thought humanity got smarter and more aware of extra-terrestrial dangers following the Trisolaran contact. Nope!The last quarter of the book becomes a lot more compelling, with the reveal of Luo Ji's plan and the final conversations with the Trisolarans. Is Luo Ji's plan also just a fuck humanity to fuck the Trisolarans plan like all the other Wallfacers? Yes! But at least he's not DIRECTLY doing it. It is one of the better plans, and it created a really compelling cliffhanger into the next book, which I will probably end up begrudgingly reading.In conclusion, I hope I don't have to read about imaginary dream girls for the rest of the year.
This is a book that builds on its predecessor's already fairly bleak ending to double down, hard, to the extent that I'm honestly rather glad that SETI has not been successful in establishing contact.
As in The Three-Body Problem, Liu uses the classic thought experiment as the template for his fiction: given current scientific understanding, what if? And when needed, the author repeats the question again and again, alongside explanations and demonstrations that are accessible and, as often as not, awe-inspiring.
This series as a whole so far takes the Fermi Paradox as its jumping-off point: Given the vastness of the universe, where is everyone else? The first book gives an elegant solution with an ominous conclusion; this book gives it a turn toward cosmic horror territory, in a way that I won't go into for obvious reasons.
One might quibble about the characters (Luo Ji is definitely a very punchable main character for a solid while), but Liu Cixin's work is never really about the characters, rather about the ideas and circumstances, and how people might react to them realistically. And in that I think he succeeds.
In any case, if you have read and enjoyed The Three-Body Problem, this is a book whose ideas' audacity and presentation blow the earlier book out of the water, while still somehow not diminishing it. This trilogy is really coming out of nowhere to be some of my favorite reading of 2023.
4.5*
The writing style is still a bit too cumbersome and all over the place for my taste, however the second book has grown on me with its rich and quite plausible narrative. I believe science fiction should evoke a sense of wonder and this book does exactly that.
Up until 3/4 of the book I was thinking of giving it 3 stars but considering it has one of the greatest (top 5 easily IMO, spoiler: the grim droplet scene and the battles in darkness) scenes of all literary science fiction I've read in its second half plus the absolutely, amazing end I changed my mind. Few books have achieved what this one did, will probably be one of my favourites for a long time.
Couldn't believe how this one was rated higher than the first one but now I understand. And it is so amazing on its own way that I find the trilogy could've ended there and it'd been great.
L'aspetto più interessante di questo libro, per me, è la capacità di risvegliare una sete di fantascienza che credevo di aver perduto.
Se passerò le prossime settimane immerso nella lettura del terzo capitolo, nel rewatch di Blade Runner e nella tentazione di iniziare The Expanse, invece di studiare per l'esame di fine agosto, sarà esclusivamente colpa de “La materia del cosmo”.
In merito al romanzo, non nascondo di aver preferito (ampiamente) “Il problema dei tre corpi”, per ritmo, efficacia degli intrighi e respiro creativo del racconto.
Eppure è innegabile la coerenza, ancora prima del senso di soddisfazione, che questo libro raggiunge nel finale.
“La materia del cosmo” richiede pazienza, intanto perché introduce una quantità sterminata di personaggi che rende difficile tenere il filo. E poi perché l'intreccio è enigmatico, soprattutto all'inizio, nel tentativo di preparare il terreno per ciò succede negli ultimi capitoli.
Insomma, ribalta un po' gli aspetti che avevo apprezzato del primo capitolo, che ha un inizio travolgente e oscuro e un finale comunque interessante, ma meno particolare e entusiasmante.
Il cinismo che dilaga e domina buona parte del libro, raccontando di un'umanità rassegnata, disperata, ma anche arrogante e piena di sé, in lotta con se stessa ancora prima che con i Trisolariani e ricca di contraddizioni.
Tutto il finale, da quando la Goccia raggiunge la flotta umana a quando alcune navi fuggono e si distruggono tra loro, è semplicemente straziante.
Mi ha colpito anche la portata, narrativa e tematica, del racconto, che si regge su una riflessione con una certa cognizione di causa circa il contatto con altre civiltà.
Sarebbe stato facile appoggiarsi ai soliti tropi già esplorati dalla fantascienza, e annacquare con superficialità critica.
E invece l'approccio è serio e rigoroso, quasi scientifico da un punto di vista sociologico (per quanto possa capirne io di sociologia).
Insomma, è un buon libro.
Eredita i difetti di scrittura del primo romanzo e non è così divertente da leggere, almeno in senso stretto.
Ogni tanto si perde un po' nell'intenzione di inserire qua e là concetti ingegneristici o informatici senza la dovuta rielaborazione, ma fa parte del gioco.
E contestualizzato nella trilogia, promette una portata ancora più ampia per il gran finale.
Listen, the translation is kind of flat, the writing perfunctory, and the innumerable pages focusing on Luo Ji's waifu who literally gets fridged was so confusingly unnecessary.
But I like how Cixin Liu thinks. In a world where Trisolaran sophons can monitor all earthly communication, the United Nations Planetary Defence Council elects four Wallfacers who are given free rein and unlimited budget to carry out massive plans whose true intention must belie their surface appearance. It's a small wedge that humans seek to leverage as Trisolaran's thoughts are open to each other making deception an unknown concept. But the perfect, shut the front door, Wallfacer Luo Ji plan, is to cast a galactic spell on a distant planet and how it gets explained is exactly why I love Cixin Liu.
“The sun will set soon. Isn't your child afraid?”
“Of course she's not afraid. She knows that the sun will rise again tomorrow.”
Quite a step up from book one, which really just feels like a Prologue. Entertaining almost the whole way constantly building up and increasing in excitement. The end was just ok.
Idk how to rate or review this. It's a super interesting story, clearly great but it's so slow and hard, as an audio listener, to keep up with.
This is a really fascinating series and I can understand why it's so revered. There are a ton of big and intricate ideas that I will continue to think about for a long while. I love how the ever-approaching threat coupled with their near-omnipotent power creates this environment of non-sensical yet logical strategies of the "wallfacers" and the sort of murder-mystery parlor scene "wallbreaker" moments, somehow the tone works in a tantalizing and almost silly way, while still causing some existential dread.
I even just loved the conceptualization of small things like temporal "countrymen".
There are only a few things that prevent me from giving this a full-hearted recommendation. At times it gets bogged down in some details or logical explanatory tangents that just feel unimportant to me and go on for awhile, distracting from the main thrust of the story. I also just think that most of the characters are fairly personality-less, there are some simple archetypes here and there, but I didn't find any of them uniquely compelling aside from their function in the plot. This could be by design with the nature of the story, or perhaps its an issue with the translation here, but either way I didn't feel as fully invested in some moments that I think I could have otherwise been.
Still, a great book that I think I enjoyed a bit more than the first! I'll probably try to finish of the trilogy pretty soon here.
Все-таки решение прочесть русский перевод вместо английского было отличным. Обычно я скептически отношусь к российским переводным изданиям, но, как оказалось, азиатскую литературу в Штатах переводят из рук вон плохо: текст слишком уж пытаются адаптировать под американские реалии, что приводит к выпадению целых кусков текста. Плюс к этому переводчики на русский добавили уйму полезных примечаний к тексту, а также нашли ряд временных несостыковок у автора.
Что по тексту, то претензии остались прежними. Персонажи очень плоские. Женские персонажи так и вовсе отсутствуют, либо являются статистами. Без доли объективации женщин у автора не обошлось.
Основная задумка второй книги вполне себе, но автор как будто бы пытался ей придать более серьезный вид, чем есть. Можно нахуевертить много слоев «аксиом астросоциологии», но суть гораздо проще, чем ее пытаются представить в тексте.
Ok I thought really hard about upping this to 4 stars, but I fear I was not able to convince myself. This book is overall slower than the first, and has less hard science ideas, but its major problem is its massive, massive plot holes. I'm going to give a broad overview of the plot hole based on the information of the summary of this book to limit spoilers, but slight spoilers for the previous novel follow.
1. Since only human thoughts are safe, the Wallfacer project is erected. Luo Ji has a strategy the Trisolarans want to kill him for, and he knows this. Yet he does not tell anyone his strategy just like the other Wallfacers. Yet in his case, it makes NO sense to keep the strategy hidden, because the Trisolarans already know what it is (which is in contrast to how they don't know the strategies of the other Wallfacers), and want to kill him so no one else knows. In which case, the logical conclusion would be to explain the strategy publicly so that it could definitely be made use of. And yet this does not happen...which was extremely frustrating to see.
2. The strategy itself isn't even that complex. How no one else thought of it in the timespan of this book which is almost two centuries boggles me. I myself figured it out before its spelled out for the readers. Heck, it's not even his idea because he gets it from someone else. It's a strategy even a normal person could think of! So how does literally no one else on this planet of billions of people over two centuries think of it!! Even when he does something that makes the strategy obvious no one makes the connection. I feel like this is the case of the author trying to make the hero successful by making all of humanity stupid.
Those plot holes were just ughh because they don't have to do with the science but the narrative and really lowered my opinion of the book. I did like how it ended though and think Luo Ji does at last do something not any normal person could, and it was still an interesting read.
Edit after reading more reviews: These book has more plot holes than I even thought of. But if you're willing to overlook it it's still a good read.
2.5/5 stars
I whole-heartedly agree with Stevie Kincade's 2-star review and this review from Simon McNeil.
2 things I remember about this book
- the nostalgia & sentimentalism of the first half
- the exceptional quality of the last 100 pages
The first thing got lost in the English translation, due to my assumption that the Vietnamese translator is as much faithful as possible to the original text
To give an example: After getting back from hibernation, Zhang Beihai meets the Asian Fleet commander in charge for the first time: “Zhang Beihai's words touched something in the commander's heart. He turned and looked out through the window at the river of stars, like the upper reaches of a long river.” In the Vietnamese text, it's not the “the upper reaches of a long river”, but is “phía thượng nguồn dòng chảy thời gian” (literally translated as “the upper reaches of the flow and ebb of time”).
Not only the English sentence sounds clumsy, it strips out the sensation of being humbled and defeated by time.
The probable solution for Fermi Paradox; this book explores this concept and put it into a thrilling story. When the solution is revealed, this story is turning into “cosmic horror”, and this is really what I felt when I learned the logic derivations.
Well, the scary part is not about the supernatural and the unknowable like Lovecraftian stories, but it is the hopelessness and knowing that there is literally no way out. We are just tiny, powerless, helpless creatures inside the Dark Forest. Possibly there are millions of millions “hunters” scattered within our unlimited size of the universe, hiding, lurking, and ready for total annihilation of our fragile civilization.
While the main idea of the story is super interesting, however, the execution of the story is otherwise. First of all, the book can be shrunk in half (or even less!), there are sooo many “side” stories that don't really add value to the main story. You can literally skip them and the story is unchanged. Second, the story seems so slow; stark contrast with The Three-body Problem which has a very fast pace and dense story. So many up-and-down and it also less “hard-science” than the preceding.
Unpopular opinion, I like The Three-body Problem more than The Dark Forest.
El arranque se me hizo algo lento y confuso. Pero llega un punto en que no puedes parar de leer. Echo en falta la organización de la historia en capítulos, los saltos repentinos de unos personajes a otros son molestos a veces.
Como historia, no defrauda. Es increíble. Estoy deseando leerme el último libro
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.
Me costó agarrarle el mismo gustito que tuve con el primer libro, pero pasado el bodrio de Luo y su mujer ideal, debo decir que el autor me volvió a cautivar con sus descripciones científicas (mucho más fluidas que las de su primera entrega, I dare say) e interesantes referencias. Estas últimas me dejaron con el corazón llenito, ya que mucho de lo que se menciona ya lo conocía por otros libros o lecturas ociosas en Wikipedia.
No recuerdo cuántas veces me cubrí la boca de la impresión y tuve que dejar el libro a lado unos momentos para analizar lo que estaba pasando. Llega un punto en el que no te das ni cuenta de que ya lo estás terminando y aún te preguntas qué más puede pasar.
Increíble.
This part definitely stunned me. It's full of twists and turns and got me hooked up so well that I was putting morning alarm to make sure I get at least 60-90 minutes of uninterrupted listening time. (I listened to the Audiobook). This was epic. I wish the story ended here but there is a third volume which I will pick up soon.
For book two in the series my criticisms of the previous book largely apply here as well but to a lesser degree. There are still info dumps, but they are less frequent and are not quite as long winded as in the previous book. The ending in particular in this go around is written in a much better and easier to understand way while still getting the pertinent information out.
The characters still are not the strong point of the novel, however several of them do feel a bit more fleshed out than previous iterations. Zhang Beihai and Dai Shi in particular being two I enjoyed. It's still very much a series of big ideas and little characters though. Common enough in hard sci-fi and while there's nothing inherently wrong with it, my preferences typically don't lean this way.
Not everything is improved though. Where the first novel did have significant female characters, this one really doesn't. Not only does it forgo the stronger female character but it takes two steps back in many ways for the females that do exist. Luo Ji's storyline in particular, just struck me as extremely odd. Keeping away from spoilers, I can only say that it's very creepy and there are some tropes present that I was uncomfortable with as they do dip into sexist territory imo. This can work if there's a compelling reason for it or if there's repercussions for characters attitudes, but neither are true in this case. It doesn't add anything to the novel and it's not important to the little characterization that does exist. So that was a bit off putting.
After slogging through the first 200 pages, the book really opens up. It deals with some of the same themes as the previous novel, minus religion, as the ETO is largely gone from the novel. Watching humans teeter between defeatism, escapism, and triumphalism was very compelling to read through out parts 2 and 3. It's often very bleak, but in a way that you could see playing out to some degree in real life. It's that balance that is just very intriguing to me and kept me glued from part 2 onwards. And the Dark Forest itself tied everything up beautifully and that theory just on it's own provides so much to think about.
It's not without it's flaws, but if you can make it through the first 200 pages, it's definitely a hell of a ride.
I often read just to escape from the horrors of the real world for a moment. Read this during second year of pandemic and there were moments when I had put down the book and rather read the news.
Bleak? Yes sir.
Believable when it comes to prediction of human behavior in catastrophic scenarios? Arguably yes.
Should you read this? OH YESSS!!!
I would have thought surpassing the first book would be nearly impossible but here we are. If the first book felt like the rug was pulled from under my feet and I got punched in the face on the way down, this one felt like a night in where I thought I was relaxing until someone calls me from my window and I realized my apartment is on the fifth floor. In short, it scared me. very much actually.
Fair warning though, do not google the theory of the same name as the book title. Which I did, so the fact that it still disturbed me when things on the books started “making sense” is quite a feat.
Unlike the first book, I think we get a main character this time, which is fine because I find them a likeable enough character. Has no delusions of grandeur or being a hero nor stupidly optimistic in the face of oncoming doom. Which is great in someone I'm depending to try to save the world except that he has no idea and no one seems to believe him when he says so. yikes.
The second book is understandably on a bigger scale than the first. I mean, the whole world is involved now. Which is great, because teamwork makes the dream work, right?
You might find yourself equal parts disappointed and/or hopeful for humanity depending on your disposition or which chapter of the book you're in. Others seem to think Liu's depiction of human behavior in this book is bleak but I disagree. We see this everyday on a large scale. So, I would say he was actually on the nose on this one, which adds to the dread once again. Because should we be in this hypothetical scenario, this book shows that we might actually be in big trouble. Seriously.
What I love most about this book is how much it does not assure us of a happy ending, lol. Unlike most movies where there is a reliable hero or heroes who will ultimately save the day (hurrah long live humanity). We don't get that and the idea of possible failure has felt more real than any book/movie I've encountered. And the thing is, I wouldn't even be mad. There was never a safety net to catch us during this whole adventure, which is ruthlessly in our face the whole time, but at the same time I found myself one of those annoyingly optimistic people hoping for the best.
