English language

ISBN:
978-1-4668-5343-0
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4 stars (217 reviews)

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.

10 editions

A dense continuation

4 stars

I tried to read this book earlier but put it down. This time, I listened on audio. The ending this book, or beginning of the next installment, was worth it.

This is a very dense text. It is almost pure plot and setup. But like the first installment's ability to give a sense of cosmic unease just by talking about physics, this book can tip you into dread with exposition. I caught myself creeping into despair yesterday; I had to shake it off.

I can see there is a point to the gloom though. We have to hit the depths before we can be raised back up. I have hope for the next book!

Review of 'The Dark Forest' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

MUCH better than the first book in the series. The author was able to weave grandiose fantastical situations, with small personal intimate ones. The first book was hard sci-fi, and this one is even harder. I had an issue with the time skips in the first book, but this one was executed much better in my mind.

The Dark Forest

2 stars

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 …

Wow

5 stars

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 …

Review of 'The Dark Forest' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This is the second book of teh trilogy that began on The Three Body Problem. And it is mindblowing. This is probably my favourite book this year, it is clever hard scifi that approaches the biggest questions about contact and proposes a "Cosmic Sociology", a science to understand other possible civilizations in the universe. And it actually makes sense!
I won't give it away, because it is just too much fun to to find it on the book, but if you have heard of Fermi's Paradox, and the idea that mathematically there should be lots of alien civilizations out there yet we seem to find none of them... well, the Dark Forest is a very good answer to those questions. This book is surprising fun, deep and even romantic in a weird way. You do need to read the first book of the series first, otherwise the Trisolarans and their …

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