The Dark Forest / Cixin Liu

The Dark Forest

(Three-Body Problem #2)

by Cixin Liu

trans Joel Martinson

science fiction

copyright 2008

read in June 2017

rated 5/10: readable but only if there's nothing else

It's taken me quite a few months to read this book. Months of reading a bit then reading another book... Coming back, reading a bit more, reading another book. Admittedly, that's not just because it's a tedious book.

I read Dark Forest on my tablet. One, I prefer to read a "paper" book. Two, I share the tablet. When I can't get the tablet, I read another book.

But, yes, this book is tedious.

A fellow reader agrees that this book is tedious. He blames it on the translator. The third in the series is, he tells me, far better. Due to a better translator. I hope that's true. I won't rush to find out.

There's some interest from the Chinese view of life. Much more dependence on central organisation and control than I would expect in a Western novel. Also some poetic imagery which is... well... unexpected.

As a very small example of the Chinese view: the main character is married and has one child. There is no suggestion that there will ever be a second child. Is this a possibly unconscious acceptance, by the author, of China's current one-child policy?

The core of the book is hard science. Not just "physical" science. There are many words devoted to deep thinking on life, the universe... and ethical behaviour.

Given, for example, that you are in a room full of people who are told to twiddle their thumbs for 30 minutes. If all of them twiddle for the full 30 minutes, they all share 100 currency units. If one jumps up and shouts, Me! Me! Me! then that person gets all the money. If more than one jump up and shout Me! Me! Me! then nobody gets anything. What do you do?

Another major problem is the "dark forest" of the title. I've read about it before, as one possibility of existence within the universe. It's a serious problem. I hope that it is solved in the third book.

But there is an awful lot of tedious verbiage to wade through, to get to the small number of very interesting concepts.

There's also an awful lot of characters to remember. Okay, I have extra problems because many of the names are Chinese and I have trouble remembering them. There are several -- not many -- female characters. I don't have an automatic recognition of their names as being female. It takes an extra moment to remember -- or logically deduce -- who they are.

Still, the different style, the different assumptions, are part of the pleasure of reading a book from a different (to my own) culture. The major difficulty is that this particular culture seems to like using a lot of words.

Give it a go. The basic ideas are good. But allow a lot of time to read this book. And read it in a situation which does not encourage falling asleep while reading.

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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Consulting Dexitroboper
Agamedes Consulting / Problems? Solved.
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"The man who has no imagination has no wings." … Muhammad Ali