Three-Body Problem Series

Original thought: A struggle to finish this one. An interesting idea marred by its pace/writing and one dimensional characters.

Update: I have since adjusted my review to bump it up by one star. Despite my issues with how this was written, I can't help but continually think back on it and the world it built. After discussing with a friend, my view on this novel, they smartly pointed out that perhaps the disconnect I had with the writing was because it was a translated work and less the book itself as a whole. I took this to heart and rethought my take on it... and ultimately agree. I'm still not going to drool over it and slap a 5star rating on it, but I can't shake the lasting power its story ultimately holds on me. Please if you're giving this a try and are unsure, take my tale in mind and give it a read.

The only three interesting words in this book are the title. The title describes a pretty keen theory, which directly addresses the Fermi Paradox. When I read the description of the theory, I should have thought "hey, that's pretty cool," but I didn't, because it was so poorly described that I actually thought "wait, that doesn't make sense" and had to re-read it.

What I re-read was something on the order of fifteen pages of dialog between the book's zero-dimensional "protagonist" and the book's only one-dimensional character, the sarcastic comic relief. This conversation is done in the dark, as per the text:

"Where are we going?" [1-D comic relief] asked.
"To the darkest place."

The only light in this place is the cigarettes they decide to smoke. Humanity, you'll be shocked to hear, is in a very dark patch, so I think the author is using this as a metaphor. I'm not sure, though, because the author's attention now turns to their smoking. After a couple of pages of preamble, we get this:

"Give me a cigarette." [0D] groped about in the dark for a while before taking the cigarette from [1D]'s hand. When [0D] next spoke, [1D] realized that he had moved to a spot three or four meters away. "We need to increase the distance to make it feel more like outer space," [0D] said. Then he lit the cigarette by twisting its filter, and [1D] lit one of his own. In the dark, two tiny red planets stood in distant opposition.

There are then three pages of dialog. You're never going to believe this, but [0D] does most of the talking, in a factual, authoritative tone. [1D] asks short questions to be refuted or incorporated into the infodump, as needed. Then, a break.

The flame on [0D]'s side rose up and moved back and forth. Evidently he had gotten up and was pacing.

Two more pages, then...

[1D] took a drag on his cigarette, and his contemplative face emerged from the darkness for a moment.

This continues on for...a while. I'll leave you with the...best?...of them:

The balls of flame brightened and their faces emerged from the darkness like the gods of this simple universe, deep in thought.

Sure thing, big fella. Eventually, we reach the end of this interminable sequence, and I finally grasped the crux of their argument, and then I did have my little moment of illumination (almost as if I'd read it on the face of my conversation partner as it was briefly lit up by him taking a drag on his cigarette.)

And here's the kicker: the sequence I just described is, in my opinion, the best part of the book. There's a ton of detritus floating in the space near this idea. There are many pages dedicated to the notions of "wallfacers", who apparently exist to put forth ideas that the author was going to use for the plot but then discarded, many many pages about the wildly over-simplistic politics of Earth in multiple eras, and perhaps the most boring space battle I've ever read. It's incredibly dull, but at least you'll find out how many meters apart each ship was as it was destroyed.

The author's social commentary is almost unbearable, but at least for most of that he tells us and doesn't show us, because I'm fairly certain that him showing us would go well past unbearable.

The worst of the book, though, is an incredibly long segment where our protagonist is challenged by his girlfriend-at-the-time to imagine his romantic ideal. He does so, and not in a way that's all that flattering to womankind. (She's gotta be smart, but not too smart, look good in firelight, and apparently attracted to narcissistic sociopaths. Etc. Etc.) He then starts to vividly imagine her, and fantasize about her all the time, and tell us about (too) many of these fantasies which are thank god not in any way sexual. The real girlfriend breaks up with him, and the heartbreak of his unrequited love for his imaginary woman turns him into an inveterate asshole womanizer.

He then wins the narrative lottery and is put in a position to request anything he wants. He gets himself a nice villa with a thick wine cellar and a big fireplace, and then commands that this woman be brought to him (squicky!). The 1-D comic relief, who has been hired to be the narrative Jeeves, then goes out and brings him (squickier!) the comic relief's very own niece (squickiest!). I'd have wrapped that in a spoiler tag, but there's no suspense to it, it's just spelled out in the text in a phone conversation. Protagonist and dream woman then go to town on each other, have a daughter, and then the dream woman and daughter are taken away to be used as a mild macguffin for the rest of the book. I've seen other reviewers call this major facet of the story misogynist (I'm fairly sure I agree), and then commenters defend the book by saying that you don't read Liu for his characters. Truer words.

So, yes, in conclusion, I would maybe recommend not reading this book. Or standing too close to it in a bookstore. Oh, and I'm going to wrap the following in a spoiler tag: it turns out the way to prevent an alien invasion is by threatening mutually assured destruction! Who could have seen that coming? and reuse a joke I once made about the author doing more to spoil the book than any mere mortal could.

Like the sophons, this book ought to be unfolded onto lower dimensions to appreciate. There are more story threads in The Dark Forest than with The Three Body Problem but Liu Cixin still manages to keep all the different threads relevant to the main theme and plot.

It does not appear that way at the beginning and throughout a good majority of the novel. It looks like The Dark Forest will commit that common science fiction sin of rambling side plots that add little-to-nothing to the experience. This is a result of the major theme of the book: dissimulation and its effects on cosmic interactions and purpose in a humane moral framework.

The theme arises simply from where The Three Body Problem left off: sophons are now able to spy on humanity almost completely. The only thing the Trisolarians do not have access to are the thoughts of people. In this manner, the Wallfacer project is born and four people are selected who will plot ways to combat the invading alien fleet without revealing their plans. They are given massive access to resources and little oversight. This project is countered by the terrorist ETO organization sympathetic to the Trisolarians who assign Wallbreakers to deduce the secret plans of the Wallfacers from their actions.

In parallel with this story line, we also follow the establishment of the Space Fleet and an officers' efforts to combat the defeatism that permeates the fledgling military branch.

The idea of dissimulation is carried into the structure of the story. There are critical moments when characters have realizations, but the content of these epiphanies are kept hidden until the character or their corresponding Wallbreaker reveals them. That means that halfway through the book, a character will have a clear understanding of where to go and why, but the reader will not discover this understanding until, say, the final twenty pages. The payoff is satisfying and events leading up to the reveal do help greatly to illuminate this, but this techinque will try the reader's patience and may discourage some who do not prefer this slow-burn method.

If the reader perseveres, they will be met with a nicely wrapped up novel and what would appear to be a resolution to the central conflict of the series. This is somewhat bewildering to me since there is one more book in the trilogy, so I will have to see where the story goes from here. Some early research seems to indicate that the next book will jump from the past to various points during the series to the future.