THE DARK FOREST - CIXIN LIU

Now this is what I’m talking about. The first book in this series, the shorter THREE BODY PROBLEM, was definitely sold as sci-fi but was, for most of the book, a mystery. Sure, the mystery had an alien solution and set up the rest of the series to be much more sci-fi-y but that book itself mostly took place in our recognizable world and did not involve too much of the far-out trappings of the genre. This book corrects that. As always with these reviews, spoilers will be included. Most of this volume takes place about 250 years before the present day. The books are still building towards the final climactic battle between the Trisolarians and Earth, but this volume manages to throw in an interesting handful of twists to keep it interesting. First, we get to see what Earth is like 250 years in the future and get an abbreviated history of the time in-between. We learn that things went to shit right after our era, when Earth was convinced they were fucked. Things got really bad and tragic, but then humanity sort of snapped itself out of it and focused on creating a better world and better weapons for the Doomsday battle. By 250, the pendulum has swung the other way and Earth is cocky. They have massive cities underground, they have a space-fleet and stations around Jupiter. They have the ability to cure most diseases and a seemingly excellent living standard and government. These portions of the books were among my favorites. I liked the concept of giant tree buildings where each “leaf” is an apartment. I liked the everything is a touch-screen aspect. He briefly hints at the way social relations have changed, i.e. there seems to no longer be families in our 21st century sense, but Lui doesn’t dwell on that and seems much more interested in the science-y stuff. I wish there had been more of that, but what can you do? He was smart to use the concept that the alien Sophons were preventing any major breakthroughs on a physics-level so all of the tech is what we have taken to its outer extreme. Liu clearly loves thinking about this stuff and it really shows. After this sort of exploration of the future, we get a sort of preview battle as the real heart of the book. The humans are arrogant and expecting victory. The main Trisolarian fleet is still about 200 years away but they send out a probe. Predictably, the probe is actually a weapon and it easily destroys everything. We then get the sort of twist of the novel, where we find out why the main character, Luo, is so important. He’s been a sort of hapless layabout for 2 books now, but the Trisolarians really want to kill him (not clear why the Sophons can’t just give him cancer) and he’s the main character so something must be going on. Turns out he invents the idea of a “Dark Forest” universe where there are dozens of super-advanced civilizations and, due to a sort of grim game theory, they have to destroy any other intelligent life they discover, to prevent said life from destroying them. As such, Earth can pursue a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction tactic with the Trisolarians by threatening to broadcast their cosmic location, ensuring that a race more powerful than them discovers and destroys their civilization. This idea seems fairly obvious to me, I’m not totally convinced that it makes sense that Luo would be the only one who could think it up, but it’s an interesting twist that sets up the last, even longer book, to be interesting. I hope we go further into the future, since that sort of speculation is the most engaging to me. I’m expecting a handful of new twists. I enjoyed the brief diversion onto a generational ship, and wish that would have stayed part of the novel. Basically, as the middle book in the trilogy, I think it did a good job setting up the next one but how I ultimately feel about it will depend on Liu’s ability to stick the landing. Lots of promise.