656 pages
French language
Published Aug. 1, 2017 by Actes Sud.
The Dark Forest (Chinese: 黑暗森林, pinyin: Hēi'àn sēnlín) is a 2008 science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the sequel to the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem (Chinese: 三体, pinyin: sān tǐ) in the trilogy titled "Remembrance of Earth's Past" (Chinese: 地球往事, pinyin: Dìqiú wǎngshì), but Chinese readers generally refer to the series by the title of the first novel. The English version, translated by Joel Martinsen, was published in 2015.
The book's premise is fascinating, it tackles quetions about life, cooperation and conflict. But I agree with kab, the author writes misogynisticly with very objectified female characters.
Reading about an ant painstakingly tracing each character on a gravestone signals the early slog. The flatness of the first two parts cannot be pinned entirely on the alternate translator either. The details are dull and offensive. Women squeal and fuss, and when they’re overeducated they calcify. The ones with speaking parts admit that the protagonist is better at their work than they are, or are dismissed as small with no air of authority, or remain nameless and/or are dispatched by violence, or are pure fantasy, insistently innocent and childlike. Colonisers are labelled art-preservingly advanced and the colonised backwards. If you can wade through the carrying over of misogyny and non-Trisolaran imperialism in Liu’s vision, there are some rewards in part three (the teardrop and the cosmic fight for resources are thrilling), still diluted by legitimising a character’s manipulation by threat of suicide, a despair orgy, and rumination-attempts on the …
Reading about an ant painstakingly tracing each character on a gravestone signals the early slog. The flatness of the first two parts cannot be pinned entirely on the alternate translator either. The details are dull and offensive. Women squeal and fuss, and when they’re overeducated they calcify. The ones with speaking parts admit that the protagonist is better at their work than they are, or are dismissed as small with no air of authority, or remain nameless and/or are dispatched by violence, or are pure fantasy, insistently innocent and childlike. Colonisers are labelled art-preservingly advanced and the colonised backwards. If you can wade through the carrying over of misogyny and non-Trisolaran imperialism in Liu’s vision, there are some rewards in part three (the teardrop and the cosmic fight for resources are thrilling), still diluted by legitimising a character’s manipulation by threat of suicide, a despair orgy, and rumination-attempts on the power of love.
This book is in a lot of ways more of everything that Three Body Problem was. It's a huger sweep, a pretty intense exploration of how getting thrown into responsibility can break people, and it builds on a lot of the ideas of the first book about how ununified people would be in response to a threat like this - stuff that now looks rather prescient after a year and a half of covid. It does also suffer from the same weaknesses, perhaps even intensified. In particular there's not much dialogue that is really characters being theirselves as opposed to Liu exploring an idea through his characters. But the good parts were so compelling that this was far from ruining the book for me.
I was left with a few questions, two of which seem like weaknesses of the book: 1) Why did Ye pick Luo to have the conversation …
This book is in a lot of ways more of everything that Three Body Problem was. It's a huger sweep, a pretty intense exploration of how getting thrown into responsibility can break people, and it builds on a lot of the ideas of the first book about how ununified people would be in response to a threat like this - stuff that now looks rather prescient after a year and a half of covid. It does also suffer from the same weaknesses, perhaps even intensified. In particular there's not much dialogue that is really characters being theirselves as opposed to Liu exploring an idea through his characters. But the good parts were so compelling that this was far from ruining the book for me.
I was left with a few questions, two of which seem like weaknesses of the book: 1) Why did Ye pick Luo to have the conversation with that she does in the preface? 2) How did any other humans know that Luo would be important? (that conversation with Ye explains Trisolaris's interest - clearly they'd have been surveilling her intensely) 3) How is there a third book? Three Body Problem left the story with an obvious lead in for a sequel, but the ending to this book could have been a series ending. I am now intrigued and want to see where Liu takes this next.
That was my first thought after finishing the first novel in the trilogy. This second book didn't change that much in my thinking. It's still okay, I liked some aspects, such as the whole 'Wallfacer' idea, but it still had a few very weird subplots, that just seem so out of place. The whole romantic subplot made me cringe, it reminded me of mail order brides. The feelings, decisions and personality of the woman in question are unimportant. Maybe that's a cultural thing but there were so many pages about this whole thing and it's just weird.
The whole idea of the dark forest is interesting, the droplet was also a good part. I wish he put more time into the characters and the story, not just into the science. That's the thing, I remember most of the science, but the characters are all very much replaceable.
In the end, …
That was my first thought after finishing the first novel in the trilogy. This second book didn't change that much in my thinking. It's still okay, I liked some aspects, such as the whole 'Wallfacer' idea, but it still had a few very weird subplots, that just seem so out of place. The whole romantic subplot made me cringe, it reminded me of mail order brides. The feelings, decisions and personality of the woman in question are unimportant. Maybe that's a cultural thing but there were so many pages about this whole thing and it's just weird.
The whole idea of the dark forest is interesting, the droplet was also a good part. I wish he put more time into the characters and the story, not just into the science. That's the thing, I remember most of the science, but the characters are all very much replaceable.
In the end, I can't recommend this book. It's not bad, but there are so many better sci-fi books out there. It's good to see some non-American sci-fi authors out there, but that doesn't mean we have to blindly praise this one. It's like pumpkin spiced latte: It's fun to have something different once in a while, it's not bad, but on it's own, it's not that great.
I will read the last book, just to get it over with. Maybe it's gonna turn this whole ship around, but I don't have any high hopes. I still don't get why so many people recommend this book.
