La materia del cosmo

I loved this. This is the continuation of Three Body Problem, in which (spoilers) we get introduced to alien lifeforms who are hatching a conspiracy to stifle human progress in any research being done into fundamental particles and a few other things so that we can’t have a huge scientific leap forward before they arrive to conquer earth in 500 years. The Dark Forest is the story of how humanity prepares to wage that war.

One interesting thing about preparing for something that will take twenty generations to accomplish is the problems of continuity. Thankfully, they have technology to freeze humans and re-awaken them at future times, and this is employed to send “reinforcements to the future” because they anticipate that as the preparations for the war goes on, defeatism will grow stronger and stronger and they will need their most loyal and positive-minded propagandists to be there in the future to assist.

This seems to be a clever way for the author to allow us to follow the same characters throughout the story, but it becomes much more than that…first of all, the future isn’t what they expected. They awaken to a veritable utopia: fusion drives have been perfected, energy concerns have gone away, there are huge megacities that are basically paradises…things have been going great and everyone is positive that humanity will win the war. The reinforcements seem to be completely unneeded.

However, one of the reinforcements starts being the target of countless assassination attempts. Hm, seems like the enemy thinks he still IS very important…you see, Luo Ji is one of four Wallfacers. What are Wallfacers? Well, as you know from the first novel, there is a problem. The enemy has these invisible sophons that can spy on all of humanity’s movements. Everything we do to prepare is under surveillance. What counter-intelligence can be employed in the face of such an extreme intelligence disadvantage?

Well, there is one place that the sophons can’t peek: the inner recesses of the mind. So the UN comes up with a scheme by which to grant massive amounts of funds to four Wallfacers, individuals who will never be questioned, and can carry out massive schemes, and are expected to try to deceive everyone as to what their true plan is. They are to keep their true schemes hidden in only the recesses of their minds, and they are expected—nay, encouraged—to actively deceive everyone as to what they are actually doing.

This creates some very interesting psychological interactions and social problems they have in their lives, which is explored in a very savory way.

In particular though, our main character Luo Ji is different from the other three in a couple ways. First, he is a sociologist. Second, he has zero aspirations in life. He doesn’t want to be a Wallfacer, and yet he is one. He only wants to live a happy life, not get entangled in grand affairs. He squanders his rights as a Wallfacer. It’s a very interesting path that the novel goes down for a while, and it’s interesting to see how it gets resolved. I could see some people being frustrated at the novel taking its time for a while with Luo Ji doing a lot of “nothing,” things that aren’t advancing the main plot, but for some reason I really enjoyed it. It was like an experiment in: if you had all the money and power in the world and wanted to just pursue happiness, what would you do? What would happen? Would it really work?

After that brief interlude, there is a character who interrupts Luo Ji’s stasis and forces him to change. It’s very sneakily done; I enjoyed it. Finally he gets on board. He starts much latter than the other three Wallfacers, and asks for much less funds. Many of his actions are mysterious even to the reader (they were to me at least). It’s neat to see how they later start to make more sense. The other three Wallfacers, by the way, each have their own subplots that get explored, and they too have sneaky things they do. Some of them. But for all of them, their plans come to naught.

I won’t give away how the novel ends, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed every single part of this from beginning through middle and through to the end, and I can’t wait to read the next one. Liu Cixin has such a way of blending massive amounts of well-thought-out futuristic ideas from physics, sociology, and so many fields into one comprehensive whole, that it’s just staggering. And he manages to also make a really compelling novel with plenty of mystery and memorable characters…I can’t put this stuff down.

Secondo libro della trilogia dei Tre Corpi di Cixin Liu. Mentre il primo libro impiegava un po' di tempo per ingranare, qui si parte subito, e con stile.

Odio quando riesco a immaginare come finirà un libro. Qui non ne ho avuto idea fino alla terzultima pagina. Ho già ordinato il terzo capitolo della trilogia.

Augh, so uneven! The writing is so stilted (possibly the fault of the translation?), the characters are cardboard and interchangeable, there are SO MANY really awkward and clumsy shoehorns of exposition and gratuitous political/scientific details, and I don't even want to talk about the ways in which the tiny number of female characters were all SUPER problematic. The first 2/3 of the book was a real struggle.

But! Things really picked up in the last third of the book, and it raised some really interesting philosophical questions, and kept me guessing about a couple of things, sooooooo that's cool I guess. But the plot still had some giant holes and then there was the whole "Humans won because, unlike this other super-advanced civilization, we understand the concept of deception. Oh and also love." thing Curious to see how the trilogy wraps up whenever they get around to translating it into English.