Book Review: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Wow. What a wild book! I am speechless.

I like The Dark Forest even better than its prequel. There is a clear improvement in the writing style. The characters are better written; they have more depth and they feel like real people (especially Luo Ji). There aren’t that many cardboard cut out characters and the ones that exist aren’t important. (unlike Mike Evans in the previous book)

The pacing in this book is impeccable. In Three Body Problem there were parts that felt rushed, especially near the end after we meet Mike Evans. It felt as if the author was in a hurry to finish the book. We were left clueless for most of the book, and then suddenly bombarded with pages upon pages of exposition without a break. That never happens in this book. In The Dark Forest the author takes his time setting the scene and describing the world even during key plot moments.

The translation felt a bit strange in a few places, for instance, what is a “neighbourhood activity center”? Do you mean a park? But overall, I understood what the author was saying quite well. Joel Martinsen makes good use of footnotes to explain things that non Chinese people are unlikely to know.

There’s a lot more focus on politics and ideology in the military than one would expect. That’s not something that we see often, but I guess it makes sense in a Chinese context. They literally killed millions of people during the Cultural Revolution for “ideological reasons”.

As a big fan of Isaac Asimov, I really respect that the author chose to pay homage to him in this book.

Don’t read this book when you’re busy as it’s not a casual read. To fully appreciate it, you need to be able to pause and reflect every once in a while. Don’t rush through this book but read it slowly. It will pay off in the end.

The rest of the review contains spoilers. Please do not read on if you haven’t finished the book.

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When you’re writing a novel that spans a long period of time, you either need to introduce new characters every few chapters, or you need a convenient way to keep the same characters. Isaac Asimov chose the former. Cixin Liu chooses the latter and therefore introduces hibernation. When it comes to most pieces of technology in the book, the explanation is quite thorough. But hibernation is introduced suddenly and it’s weird that the readers are expected to just go along with it.

It’s also weird that some people are okay with dying when they can be hibernated until a cure can be found for their disease. The fact that only the rich can hibernate themselves and that people are okay with it stands in stark contrast with how people are not okay with letting only the rich escape the doomsday battle. The idea of “if not me then nobody” should apply equally to both of these cases, but they don’t and that’s a little strange. It makes hibernation seem more of a plot convenience than a well thought out part of the world.

The concept of Cosmic Sociology is very thought-provoking. This is the most creative explanation to the Fermi Paradox that I have ever seen. The worst part is, it makes perfect sense. Given those two axioms and those two concepts, the universe being a Dark Forest is a logical conclusion. Like how Luo Ji says in the book, it is one of those things, that, when you understand it, you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it before.

It’s good that this theory is not shoved in our face at once but is revealed slowly throughout the novel. It’s first introduced in the very first chapter. We also see a glimpse of “chains of suspicion” in Starship Earth. All of this makes the final explanation more weighty. In a way, it feels as if the whole novel exists only to teach the reader this theory. As I said before, the pacing in this novel is perfect.

Interstellar Mutually Assured Destruction is fucking cool. I loved the part where Luo Ji gambles with the fates of two civilizations and also the slow build up to this final confrontation. The Trisolarans were quite stupid to abandon the ETO. They would’ve seen through his plan well before he could implement it.

I would’ve found the “power of love” ending a bit jarring and in conflict with everything that has just been explained to us, if it had not already been foreshadowed in the first book. There was a Trisolaran in the first book who cared about Earth enough to warn us, risking the life of his own civilization in the process. I’ve grown quite fond of Trisolaris now and I hope they aren’t eliminated in the next book. Cixin Liu, please give me a happy ending.