Book Review: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu.

‘The Dark Forest’ is the second novel in the science fiction trilogy by China’s best-known SF writer, the Hugo aware winning Cixin Liu. Starting with ‘The Three Body Problem’, which I reviewed in my post of 30Aug17,  the series will conclude with ‘Death’s End’. For the sake of those who haven’t read ‘The Three Body Problem’ let me give a brief summary of it before I go on to ‘The Dark Forest’. (Although you could just read my review, hint, hint). The image below shows Cixin Liu.

In the ‘Three Body Problem’ a Chinese astrophysicist named Ye Zhetai has seen her father murdered and was herself tortured during her country’s cultural revolution of the 1960s. Forced to work for a super secret military program Madam Ye makes contact with an alien civilization called the Trisolarians, living on a planet orbiting the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system. Hating her own species for the things that were done to her Madam Ye gives the Trisolarians the information they need to launch an invasion fleet against Earth. The Trisolarian fleet is traveling at one percent of the speed of light so it will take more than 400 years for the aliens to arrive in our solar system. ‘The Three Body Problem’ ends with the governments of the world becoming aware of the alien threat.

In ‘The Dark Forest’ humanity is now faced with the task of trying to work together to develop a defense against the technologically superior Trisolarian invasion fleet, even if it’s not going to reach Earth for 400 years. To make matters worse the Trisolarians have succeeded in sending sub-atomic probes called sophons to Earth that are not only keeping mankind under constant surveillance but are even able to interfere with the results of experiments probing the fundamental laws of the Universe, CERN, LIGO, etc. Because of the sophons humanity cannot advance in new knowledge but only improve the technology we have that is based on already established physics, which leaves us in a perpetual technical disadvantage relative to the Trisolarians.

Faced with this continuous surveillance and the blocking of our scientific advance the UN Security Council responds with the Wallfacer program. Four men are selected to develop strategies to defeat the Trisolarians, strategies that they will keep entirely to themselves, telling no one at all in an effort to keep the sophons from figuring it out.

The Wallfacers are given total control over the entire resources of mankind; they get whatever they need to carry out their plans. Three of the Wallfacers are men of achievement and renown, men with military, political and scientific credentials. The fourth is Luo Ji, an irresponsible, self-centered, perpetual student but he’s also the only man that the Trisolarians want dead.

Luo Ji’s importance stems from a conversation he had with Ye Zhetai that is in fact the first scene of the novel so pay attention as you read it. Much of ‘The Dark Forest’ is concerned with Luo Ji’s trying to figure out why the Trisolarians are so afraid of what he and Madam Ye talked about.

While Luo Ji is the main focus of the novel there are subplots and complications galore. With the other three Wallfacers along with people who feel that humanity’s only hope is to escape into intergalactic space before the Trisolarians get here, the story has more than enough twists and turns to keep you guessing as to what’s gonna happen next!

I don’t want to give away too much but I do want to admit to having made an incorrect guess in the first novel. In the ‘The Three Body Problem’ Madam’s Ye’s daughter Yang Dong has committed suicide before the story even starts and I predicted that she wasn’t really dead yet. Well as it turned out she didn’t show up in ‘The Dark Forrest’ so I suppose I was wrong. Of course there is still ‘Death’s End’, which I plan on reading quite soon.