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.
The second part is as good as the first one.
A great combination of astrophysics, sociology, philosophy.
Luckily I read Asimov's Foundations before Cixin books and I see there are alot of references and parallels with them.
The translation to EN was better and more understandabla in the first part.
I had big difficulties imagining characters. Maybe because of Chinese names, or because of their one-dimensionality.
La historia parece centrarse en ésta ocasión en los vallados, tres hombres con plena libertad para planificar la defensa de la tierra ante la futura llegada de los extraterrestres invasores, que ocurrirá dentro de 400 años.
el comienzo me está gustando, cuando lo termine actualizaré la reseña.
The book's premise is fascinating, it tackles quetions about life, cooperation and conflict. But I agree with kab, the author writes misogynisticly with very objectified female characters.
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 …
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 with that she does in the preface?
2) How did any other humans know that Luo would be important? (that conversation with Ye explains Trisolaris's interest - clearly they'd have been surveilling her intensely)
3) How is there a third book? Three Body Problem left the story with an obvious lead in for a sequel, but the ending to this book could have been a series ending. I am now intrigued and want to see where Liu takes this next.
