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Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest
I finally got around to reading The Dark Forest, the second volume of Chinese SF writer Liu Cixin's blockbuster Three-Body trilogy, of which I read the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, a couple of years ago. I thought this installment (translated by Joel Martinsen) was a more elegant and absorbing read than the first, though I still have my quibbles; it makes me more enthusiastic about getting the third volume than the first one had about this one.
There are spoilers for the first volume in what follows; I'll try to avoid revealing too many plot surprises about the second. Spoilers will be allowed in the comments, so don't read them if you don't want that.
The Three-Body Problem was a story of first contact with the ultimately hostile inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. By the end of that story, the Trisolarians were planning to invade our solar system and wipe us out completely, and were guilelessly informing us of the fact (though they used various means to mask their true nature, we are told that the Trisolarians are fundamentally incompetent at deceit, because they've evolved to read each others' thoughts directly).
As The Dark Forest opens, the Trisolarian space armada is headed our way, ETA in four centuries. Fundamental physics research has been shut down by the intervention of "sophons", intelligent subatomic particles that can communicate instantaneously with Trisolaris through quantum entanglement (grumble grumble QUANTUM DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY... never mind me). The sophons are also spying on everyone all the time; it must be assumed that nothing we do can be hidden to Trisolaris.
Nothing, that is, except the thoughts we think... because, while they may be effectively telepathic among themselves, they can't read our minds. So, as an act of desperation, the UN establishes the "Wallfacer Project": four illustrious individuals are given basically arbitrary powers and told to dream up some private stratagem to beat the Trisolarian armada, without ever fully revealing what they're really up to.
Three of the Wallfacers immediately rev up huge research and industrial projects, while human quislings try to suss out their true intentions. The fourth, an astronomer named Luo Ji who had once had a fateful conversation with the previous volume's character Ye Wenjie about "cosmic sociology", wants no part of the program and tries to quit... only to discover that he can't, because nobody has any way of knowing whether he really means it! So he decides to just abuse his powers and fart around: he orders up a palatial mansion and a rather creepy search for his dream woman, and generally tries the patience of his overseers and the general public, while claiming it's all part of the plan. Curiously, though, Luo Ji seems to be the only one of the four Wallfacers who the Trisolarians are actually scared of. Hard-bitten cop Da Shi, a major character carried over from The Three-Body Problem, has a difficult time keeping him alive.
Meanwhile, the novel also follows Chinese naval officer Zhang Beihai as he participates in the development of a new Space Force, to perform the seemingly completely hopeless task of taking on the gigantic Trisolarian fleet in the distant year when it arrives. But how do you even convince people to keep working against impossible odds, and the crushing despair that must come with them? How do you keep them from diverting their effort into, say, just bugging out of the Solar System entirely (an escape that the Trisolarians are openly interested in crushing as well)? The despair, and the stresses of the immense defense effort, are enough to send China and the whole world into an era of social upheaval.
Effective hibernation technology has apparently been perfected in the near future; the novel uses this to send its characters across huge spans of time. Individuals can choose to work in the era they've been given, oversee centuries-long projects personally, or go to sleep until the Doomsday Battle itself so they can lend a hand at Ragnarok. The Dark Forest effectively conveys the rise and fall of regimes through the Crisis Era in an almost Stapledonian manner, and while this is an extremely grim story in many ways, it ends up being surprisingly less nihilistic than I'd have thought; this is a novel with a fairly satisfying conclusion.
It's also a novel that makes more effective use of characters than its predecessor; it wisely stays attached to the humans rather than saying too much more about Trisolaris. It backs off a bit on the psychedelic goofiness of the sophons that was introduced at the end of the previous novel; for the most part they're an implied, theoretical presence more than an overt one. The emphasis is more on the evolution of human societies over a long span of time under an extraordinary stress, and the book delivers there.
However, Liu does bobble his background research in a number of places, as in the first book. There's an assassination scene in space at one point which is quite cleverly done, except that the orbital dynamics, as far as I can tell, are just all wrong. The system of Trisolaris still doesn't resemble the real Alpha Centauri in any way, shape or form apart from having three stars; you pretty much have to accept that for the sake of the story.
Liu clearly loves SF, including Western SF, and there are more references dropped here and there to Asimov and Clarke and Star Trek that sometimes seem a bit too on-the-nose. But they'll add a note of familiarity to Western SF readers.
The treatment of Luo Ji's kind of icky courtship of the best available approximation to the woman of his dreams, under the pretense of The Plan, as a more or less straight romance may sit poorly with some readers.
There are also a few near-future bits that have already been obsoleted by real-world events, but I won't hold that against him.
In any event, I'm now considerably curious about the third volume, Death's End.
There are spoilers for the first volume in what follows; I'll try to avoid revealing too many plot surprises about the second. Spoilers will be allowed in the comments, so don't read them if you don't want that.
The Three-Body Problem was a story of first contact with the ultimately hostile inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. By the end of that story, the Trisolarians were planning to invade our solar system and wipe us out completely, and were guilelessly informing us of the fact (though they used various means to mask their true nature, we are told that the Trisolarians are fundamentally incompetent at deceit, because they've evolved to read each others' thoughts directly).
As The Dark Forest opens, the Trisolarian space armada is headed our way, ETA in four centuries. Fundamental physics research has been shut down by the intervention of "sophons", intelligent subatomic particles that can communicate instantaneously with Trisolaris through quantum entanglement (grumble grumble QUANTUM DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY... never mind me). The sophons are also spying on everyone all the time; it must be assumed that nothing we do can be hidden to Trisolaris.
Nothing, that is, except the thoughts we think... because, while they may be effectively telepathic among themselves, they can't read our minds. So, as an act of desperation, the UN establishes the "Wallfacer Project": four illustrious individuals are given basically arbitrary powers and told to dream up some private stratagem to beat the Trisolarian armada, without ever fully revealing what they're really up to.
Three of the Wallfacers immediately rev up huge research and industrial projects, while human quislings try to suss out their true intentions. The fourth, an astronomer named Luo Ji who had once had a fateful conversation with the previous volume's character Ye Wenjie about "cosmic sociology", wants no part of the program and tries to quit... only to discover that he can't, because nobody has any way of knowing whether he really means it! So he decides to just abuse his powers and fart around: he orders up a palatial mansion and a rather creepy search for his dream woman, and generally tries the patience of his overseers and the general public, while claiming it's all part of the plan. Curiously, though, Luo Ji seems to be the only one of the four Wallfacers who the Trisolarians are actually scared of. Hard-bitten cop Da Shi, a major character carried over from The Three-Body Problem, has a difficult time keeping him alive.
Meanwhile, the novel also follows Chinese naval officer Zhang Beihai as he participates in the development of a new Space Force, to perform the seemingly completely hopeless task of taking on the gigantic Trisolarian fleet in the distant year when it arrives. But how do you even convince people to keep working against impossible odds, and the crushing despair that must come with them? How do you keep them from diverting their effort into, say, just bugging out of the Solar System entirely (an escape that the Trisolarians are openly interested in crushing as well)? The despair, and the stresses of the immense defense effort, are enough to send China and the whole world into an era of social upheaval.
Effective hibernation technology has apparently been perfected in the near future; the novel uses this to send its characters across huge spans of time. Individuals can choose to work in the era they've been given, oversee centuries-long projects personally, or go to sleep until the Doomsday Battle itself so they can lend a hand at Ragnarok. The Dark Forest effectively conveys the rise and fall of regimes through the Crisis Era in an almost Stapledonian manner, and while this is an extremely grim story in many ways, it ends up being surprisingly less nihilistic than I'd have thought; this is a novel with a fairly satisfying conclusion.
It's also a novel that makes more effective use of characters than its predecessor; it wisely stays attached to the humans rather than saying too much more about Trisolaris. It backs off a bit on the psychedelic goofiness of the sophons that was introduced at the end of the previous novel; for the most part they're an implied, theoretical presence more than an overt one. The emphasis is more on the evolution of human societies over a long span of time under an extraordinary stress, and the book delivers there.
However, Liu does bobble his background research in a number of places, as in the first book. There's an assassination scene in space at one point which is quite cleverly done, except that the orbital dynamics, as far as I can tell, are just all wrong. The system of Trisolaris still doesn't resemble the real Alpha Centauri in any way, shape or form apart from having three stars; you pretty much have to accept that for the sake of the story.
Liu clearly loves SF, including Western SF, and there are more references dropped here and there to Asimov and Clarke and Star Trek that sometimes seem a bit too on-the-nose. But they'll add a note of familiarity to Western SF readers.
The treatment of Luo Ji's kind of icky courtship of the best available approximation to the woman of his dreams, under the pretense of The Plan, as a more or less straight romance may sit poorly with some readers.
There are also a few near-future bits that have already been obsoleted by real-world events, but I won't hold that against him.
In any event, I'm now considerably curious about the third volume, Death's End.
no subject
1. Liu repeatedly refers to giant space telescopes as having huge "lenses", as if they were refractors, which is peculiar and makes me wonder if he's ever looked at a large telescope. I do wonder if this is a translation issue.
2. Would a 250-megaton-yield H-bomb really be that qualitatively different from a fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba, feasible with 1950s-60s Soviet technology? My impression was that there was no real practical obstacle to making gigantic-yield fusion weapons, just the lack of any military application even by the terrifying standards of nuclear deterrence strategy. But I could be off base here. I guess they'd be pretty large.
3. The scheme used in his world for designating extrasolar planetary systems seems impractical, since the catalog designation would have to change every time a new planet is discovered. But I guess I'm getting into really minor quibbles now--considered as a fictional device, the scheme does serve a purpose for the reader of making it easier to tell which system he's talking about.
no subject
Regarding space telescopes. I'm thinking in terms of what might be possible if you could build the lenses and rest of the assemblies in orbit and didn't have to pay the gravity tax to boost off of Earth. I'll have to ask my wife about it: she's an astronomer and operates a 3.5 meter telescope. The problem is that I'll never be able to get her to read the books, she has too many other things to read in her queue.