Commenting on the first book in a trilogy is a perilous affair. Not all of the author's ideas or characters are fully developed. The impact is staggered across the subsequent volumes. The vision and the achievement of the work has to be taken in the round. These were the gist of many replies my review of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem provoked around various the corners of the internet. Having now read the sequel, The Dark Forest, if anything the story takes a turn for the worse. This middle book is very middling.
To summarise where we left off, a Chinese radio scientist advertised the location of the Earth to a nearby predatory alien civilisation. Their world is threatened with destruction by their suns, and have launched an invasion/colonisation fleet in our direction. Owing to the distances involved they will turn up approximately 400 years after the close of the first book. The 'Trisolarians' are assisted by the sophons, microscopic supercomputers they sent to Earth at the speed of light to mess with physics experiments, preventing significant technological advancement, and to put the preparation of the planet's defence under total surveillance. Also assisting the aliens are groups of humans who, for a variety of reasons, would rather see our species destroyed or placed on reservations under the extra-terrestrial boot. Thanks to some plot-convenient violence to how quantum entanglement operates, both can instantaneously communicate with approaching fleet and the home world.
Spoilers follow.
The Dark Forest is about how Earth meets this threat. The narrative orbits around the efforts of the wallfacers, experts selected by the UN to come up with strategies for stopping the invasion. They are not to write their plans down, nor converse with others about them. They are granted unlimited resources and the authorities are expected to obey their orders. The sophons cannot read minds, and so they can only guess at what the facers are doing. However, several turncoat humans have appointed themselves "wallbreakers". They shadow their opponents, figure out their plans, and confront them when they have done so. And surely, one-by-one, the facers' schemes are rumbled. All except for Luo Ji, a washed up social scientist turned astronomer who for some reason the Trisolarians are trying to murder.
In the second half of the book, Luo wakes up after a couple of centuries in cold sleep. He comes to in a science fictional future: wireless power transmission, vast underground cities, colonies on other planets, and a hefty space fleet. While all this is amazing to Luo, it's the result of applying already-understood physics. There have been no qualitative breakthroughs since the aliens shut down all our particle accelerators. Nevertheless, the world is confident that they can take on the Trisolarians. And by way of a demonstration, a thousand-strong battle squadron of ships are set to rendezvous with a probe the aliens have sent ahead of their fleet. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, instead of suspense all Liu's leaden prose conveys is tedium. Not that this necessarily matters for genre SF. It never did Arthur C Clarke's or Isaac Asimov's sales any harm. Like its predecessor, Dark Forest goes big on the big ideas, and I suppose for those not versed in the usual tropes they can appear spectacular. For example, this book has leant its name to the so-called dark forest hypothesis, one of the "solutions" to the Fermi Paradox. I.e. If there are aliens, why are they not here? Liu's answer is they're there alright, but they keep themselves to themselves lest they be espied and destroyed by another civilisation. Kill them before they can kill you is the pessimistic resolution of the great silence. Luo demonstrates the truth of this supposition. Sending out a signal that purports to come from a star 50 light years away, several decades later it goes nova. Astronomers spotted a fast moving object slam into the star. Someone out there wasn't taking any chances.
The real problem with Dark Forest is its misanthropy. Liu betrays a rather dim view of his fellow humans. We are cast as irredeemably credulous, stupid, cowardly, and cruel. In the present, the wallfacers are feted as rock stars who can do no wrong. Forget the cynicism that is the lot of contemporary culture, including Chinese culture, it's like we've all become participants in personality cults - but we mean it. This enthusiasm manifests itself in a hysteria against "escapism". The masses push for and successfully see laws implemented forbidding states and individuals from building their own ships to flee into the cosmos. We're all in it together as the herd insists we keep our eggs in one basket.
All of these collective flaws come to a head in the space battle. As the probe comes to a halt, the thousand warships line up in formation for the show down. What we get instead is a massacre. Thanks to the Trisolarians' hoodoo physics the probe becomes a wrecking ball that smashes through the engines of the lined up ships, causing them to explode one after the other. Evidently, our descendents had learned nothing from ocean-going navies, let alone three-dimensional space combat video games. Some ships at the margin of the massacre are able to escape and chance it on an escapist, interstellar run. A good job they remembered to pack the cryogenics. But before they do, they butcher each other so the victors have enough supplies and parts to keep them going for a centuries' long voyage. And because of the defeat, everyone on Earth, everyone panics and starts treating Luo as the second coming. They're soon disappointed as he concentrates working on a project ceding the solar system with dust, which will help determine the coordinates of the Trisolarians when they arrive. He's condemned as a fraud while civilisation falls into despondency.
The rendering of these dramatics are rather amateur. Clunky, mechanical, grating, none of this was worth the eventual pay off. It's not just that the writing is poor, the plotting obvious, the whole book - much more than the first - oozes condescension. The dim view of human nature and the patronising 'we are but children who know nothing' sentiment was a real drag, as was the implicit endorsement of putting trust in the abilities of out betters. Humanity here is not a civilisation trying to defend itself, it's the backdrop, a collection of bystanders that can only cheer or cry.
Obviously, this is not a recommend. But despite itself, two books into the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy I am masochistically invested enough to put myself through the final installment. Read this as a warning and save yourself some time.
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8 comments:
I noped out after the first book, even though it massively redeemed itself in the final stretch with a sudden explosion of luridly entertaining wild ideas. I just wasn't hopeful that the rest would be worth it after such a shaky start.
Your criticism of the second reminds me of what I thought about Nolan's The Dark Knight. For all the OTT greatness of every scene involving Joker (and all the half-baked tedium of most scenes which don't), so much of the film's plot hinges on the population of Gotham behaving like creatures which would make sheep - or even MAGAts during the pandemic - appear to be geniuses. However dumb that you've seen real humans behaving, it's just not that dumb.
Anyway, "dark forest" as in the Fermi solution doesn't stand up to much close inspection nowadays (probably rather like the series of the same name). If whole solar systems were getting routinely massacred out there, we'd see it happening. If it was done on a smaller and quieter (but still crass) scale - planet crackers rather than star crackers - then the flight time for the cracker to arrive is a nearly fatal sticking point, hence the need for the "sophons" in Cixin's world. If it was done on a still quieter and stealthier scale, by actually sending "sophon"-like agents to observe and interfere with the target world, then why don't the paranoid aliens' agents arrive long before the industrial revolution, or indeed the stone age? The whole idea requires some serious handwavium to make the numbers add up.
Something which just occurred to me: Cixin's trilogy is rather like a science fiction equivalent of the works of J. K. Rowling. A series which achieves great commercial success precisely because of the sheer mediocrity of the thinking behind it.
Although I enjoyed a lot of the Iate Iain M. Banks there were regular occurrences of giant space battles. I'd skip forward 20 pages, muttering "The Culture wins, as usual," to avoid the tedium.
'a Chinese radio scientist inadvertently advertised the location of the Earth to a nearby predatory alien civilisation.'
Inadvertently? That she did it deliberately is one of the most powerful passages in the book.
You see Ken, it was a deliberate error to see if Scotland's premier writer of science fiction was on the ball. It had nothing to do with being sloppy and writing late at night.
She kinda did do it accidentally, the first time. Or rather, she did what she intended to do, but didn't expect a predatory alien civilisation to answer.
One of the more endearing parts of the book is how they initially answer, with someone exactly like a mirror of herself turning up on the other end of the line.
Well... Surface Detail did try to make a point about the giant space battles between contemporary equals getting rarer and rarer as those equals age into possession of more and more terrifying tech, resulting in them "continuing war by other means", in a new arena where the Culture isn't all that shit hot actually.
The space battle which does happen is an almost-accidental stomp of some definitely-not-equals who were trying it on. Plus there's a disjointed subplot reminding us that the angry elder ghosts of the Culture verse can still swat the Culture like bugs if they're disturbed. (And despite all this it's definitely one of the limper Culture books).
Kind of ironic that the premise of a book called ‘The Three-Body Problem’ appears to model all its interstellar relations purely bilaterally. The incentives on potential belligerents change dramatically when one introduces the possibility a bigger fish might already be watching them both to see if they are a threat.
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