First impressions review: The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu

 

This book is even more difficult to review than the first in the series. ‘The Three Body Problem’ compensated for its wooden characters by containing some very interesting ideas – not that I agree with all of them, but the alien society we get a glimpse of is cool – and having a mystery structure that pulls you through the dull bits quite effectively on a first read, though not so much a second one. This one doesn’t have that mystery structure, introduces a ton of new characters, most of whose “voices” are completely indistinguishable, and barely shows us the cool aliens at all, but does cover 200 years and therefore a lot of social and technological development. As a result, my interest levels fluctuated wildly. This is roughly how it went (hopefully without any key spoilers):

 

*Pages 1-16. OK, so we’ve got Ye Wenjie, the lady from the first book, talking to this new guy Luo Ji about a possible new field called Cosmic Sociology. Given that her suggested maxims are “Survival is the primary need of civilization” and “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant,” it is pretty clear what she thinks the conclusion is. Not sure why we’re watching this conversation from the perspective of an ant, unless it is a reference to the humans being "bugs". (Later update: Oh. Clearly that was also an attempt to distract the reader, so they won’t get frustrated with how long it takes Luo Ji to do something with this idea!)

*Pages 16-21. Ah, apparently the Trisolarans have little concept of subterfuge, because as soon as they think something it is “broadcast” on their skin, like a squid changing color with its emotions. Seems like that would be something they would have learned to overcome, since they are capable of communication at a distance with words instead of images. But whatever; the humans need to have some advantage given the tech imbalance to make this interesting.

*Pages 22-305. Uggh, so bored! Can somebody just do something or experience something rather than standing around talking like exposition robots? Having all the main characters be decision-makers instead of more ordinary people experiencing the results of their decisions was probably a mistake. The “Wallfacer” project, intended to use that human ability to hide thoughts, is an interesting one, but we needed to  either see the Wallfacer’s secret thoughts – to enjoy their trickery - or more distant so that we could try to figure out their actions without them yammering in our ear the whole time. The most interesting thing in this section was one character’s decision to assassinate some people with bullets made of meteorite (which makes sense in context) – that was genuinely mysterious and exciting.

Also, I hate you, Luo Ji, you dull, self-indulgent misogynist!

*Pages 306-391: Hey, this is finally getting fun! The future underground city is kind of cool – though the idea that humans basically destroyed the surface of our planet to build planetary defenses seems depressingly plausible. They’ve also unfrozen the only character with a personality (the policeman from book 1), and someone’s tried to assassinate Luo Ji five times in a day using creative methods. Also, one of the Wallfacers deals with an actual personal betrayal, and the guy with the meteorite assassination plan has another cold-blooded but creative scheme.

*Pages 391-465: OMG, why are the future humans so stupid! Even an armchair historian like me knows it is a bad idea to send your entire army to intercept the suspiciously-innocent-looking object sent by a technologically advanced enemy, and to keep them bunched up in tight formation when you do it. Jesus! (Later update: Dear author. How can you simultaneously think love is this special unique property of humans and also assume we’d all go ‘Lord of the Flies’ on each other the second we are separated from earth? That seems weird to me.)

*Pages 465-512: So Luo Ji did figure out what Ye Wenjie was talking about and try to do something with it. Thank fucking God! But why are you talking about that idea out loud to your policeman friend? The sophons can still hear you! It’s lucky for you the Trisolarans are apparently super bad at subterfuge, because any human hearing that speech would have been watching you like a hawk ever since. But good job for coming up with the one plan that might lead to peace, even though it is predicated on the assumption of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. 

 

I’m not sure if I’m going to read the third book in this series, as the writing style clearly isn’t my cup of tea and this book ends at a place where I could comfortably leave the story. Some other thoughts are listed below, if you want the rest of the rant and don’t mind a few **spoilers**.

 

 

1) If there is a main thesis to this book, it comes from the logical conclusion to those propositions stated by Ye Wenjie: If civilizations are inherently expansionist and resources are finite, then every planet with life should act like hunters sneaking around a dark forest trying not to step on twigs while knifing any other hunters they encounter before they can lose an encounter. That’s certainly an interesting, if pessimistic take. But I don’t understand why one would assume that, but also clearly not think that’s how human civilizations do act or should act toward one another on earth. One might say: “Well, humans can easily talk with one another, and so at least potentially understand each other’s intentions and come to diplomatic solutions.” But…the Trisolarans and humans are able to communicate immediately and end up having a diplomatic exchange at the end when Luo Ji threatens to reveal the position of both planets to anyone else in the galaxy who’s watching. It seems, then, like we are supposed to assume that kind of communication would often be possible with a high enough technology level. So why wouldn’t diplomacy be more common – especially since it still takes hundreds of years for the very advanced Trisolarans to move their large warships the 4 light years to earth? And why do humans in this story lose their ability to talk with each other and try to come up with mutually agreeable solutions to problems the minute they cut their ties to earth? The earth doesn’t emit magical “love and cooperation” waves!

Speaking of which, the alien individual who tried to warn earth, and who we hear from again at the end of this book, says Trisolarans are capable of love but suppressed that instinct because it isn’t efficient in their harsh environment. That makes no sense! In any social species, groups function better when the group members cooperate. And group members cooperate most easily when they have evolved an instinct for pro-social behavior (helping each other out). At least for those with mammal- or bird-like brains, that instinct tends to manifest in getting feel-good brain chemical rewards when we are near other individuals and interacting with them in positive, mutually-beneficial ways. Those warm feelings generally fall into one of the many categories of “love”, whether that’s pure-but-somewhat-abstract good feelings of siblinghood with other beings (agape), a close equal bond with a friend (philia), the affection of parents toward offspring (storge), or romantic love (pragma being the long-term form, but even the more unstable eros – the “falling in love” feeling – often prompting acts of self-sacrifice). If you didn’t have agape or storge…why the heck would you care if your planet was set to fall into the sun at some distant point in the future? The government of Trisolaris is depicted as authoritarian, but cooperation generated purely by force tends to be very unstable compared to when it comes at least partially from those pro-social impulses. They should be dealing with revolts and dissent left and right!  

 

2) As I noted in my review of ‘To hold up the sky’, Liu clearly focuses more on physics and does not have a strong grasp of biology or environmental science (which happen to be my areas of expertise and interest). In this book, that manifests in three main ways:

A) While the humans are agonizing about how they could possibly design a bigger atomic bomb without a quantum computer…they somehow invent the ability to send people into hibernation for 400 years almost immediately with no fanfare. We are not even close to being able to being able to do that! I kind of wanted someone to open up the hibernation chambers in the future and just go “Well, shit,” as they discover all the past scientists and military leaders have basically become freezer-burned turkeys.

B) One of the Wallfacers is focusing on building a model of the human brain, which there are several issues with. The model he’s building is as complex as the brain itself…and if you do that the model is useless because you can’t understand it any better than the original system! The whole point of a model is to make it just complex enough to capture the key behaviors but no more. Also, he thinks the key to thought is at the quantum level, but can somehow manipulate thought by zapping stuff at the neuron level. That makes no sense!

C) The fact that humans, in the course of making their space stuff, rendered the surface of the earth a giant desert is treated as a minor inconvenience at most. And OK, sure, if you’ve designed spaceships that can be self-sustaining then you can probably survive on a wrecked earth. But the society of this time is just so comfortable, and some do live on the surface, carving out farming communities in the dang desert with nothing more than some trees to break the sandstorms. What? Of course, Liu also said the underground cities grew wheat varieties that were all ear and no stalk, which shows a lack of understanding of how plants work. In order to photosynthesize and make the carbohydrates that make grain nutritious, a plant must capture light energy with chlorophyll. This requires a fairly high surface-to-volume ratio, hence leaves. While a few plants like cacti don’t have leaves but instead photosynthetic stems, these plants are also notoriously slow-growing – not what you want to feed your underground civilization.

 

3) The human psychology and sociology also frequently made no sense to me. For instance:

A) People across the world react to the prospect of alien invasion with a great degree of anxiety, depression, and defeatism, even though it won’t happen for 400 years. Considering the lax responses of many people and their leaders to long-term existential threats like climate change or even more acute crises like the current pandemic, this seems odd to me. Are there no “alien deniers”? Granted, this book was written in 2008, but we had already been not-acting on climate change for a couple of decades at that point. People do tend to be better at responding to threats that are conscious entities but, still, I don’t think there are enough people just ignoring the invasion!

B) At least twice society reacts violently to the prospect of “escapism” – sending some portion of humans off-world to escape the alien take-over and safeguard a fragment of our civilization. I could see that kind of reaction to particular ways of doing this: if only billionaires got to leave, for example, or if building the starships was using up resources needed for defense or was destroying the earth. In the book, though, people seem to be acting on the logic of “if we can’t all go, then no one goes!” But when the Titanic was sinking, even if there was some argument over who got to use the lifeboats, the passengers didn’t just try to smash them all! Likewise with refugees; they don’t tend to stop and fight just because some people might get out and others not.

C) Apparently preparing to defend earth against the Trisolarans wrecks the economy. But…why? World War II arguably pulled us out of the Great Depression, because the government was spending a lot to ramp up tank production and whatnot, which created jobs. Ration cards show up very early in this book, which may be a reference to that time, but what happened to food production? The WWII rationing had a lot to do with disrupted transport, but that shouldn’t be the case here. Farms also shouldn’t be directly impacted, so is all the food just going to feed the space workers? Are people being asked to plant Victory Gardens and, if not, why not?

D) What kind of political/economic system is the 200-years-future earth supposed to have? There are personalized ads everywhere, which seems to suggest some kind of hyper-capitalism, but resources seem pretty evenly distributed, people are weirdly relaxed about their jobs, and no one mentions business leaders at all, which doesn’t seem to fit with that. 

 

4) I’ve seen some people comment that these books feel sexist but not explain why, and now I understand. There is that vibe, but it is hard to pin down specific examples. A few contributing factors include:

A) All but one of the POV characters in the first two books are men, as are most of the named scientists, military people, and government officials.

B) A lot of the women are either traitors to humanity or gentle, decorative, and basically useless, with nothing in between. There isn’t even a feisty old grandma or down-to-earth farmer’s wife, like we get among the hobbits in ‘Lord of the Rings’ – which has similarly low numbers of women – let alone an Eowyn or Galadrial. We are told that half the future space fleet is female, but we never see any of these women exercise real authority and there is a weird tendency to pause the narrative to describe how pretty they are - which doesn’t happen with the male characters, whose appearance often isn’t described at all.

C) Luo Ji thinks you can order up your dream woman as if out of a catalog and it works! Having him be the one to talk to the aliens about love is very ironic because he certainly doesn’t seem to feel any philia or pragma toward his wife (treating her as an equal or at least a helpmeet) or any intense, protective storge toward his kid. His attitude toward them is more a slightly detatched agape. He seems to view them like decorative ornaments to his life or something on a pillar to worship. Good for the wife for finally calling him out on his laziness about doing anything for humanity with the only gesture he’d respond to, though. He also thinks that no one would have elected a Filipina woman secretary of the UN if they knew the alien invasion was coming…but apparently other people are able to see that a petite Asian woman can be a good leader, because she does get re-elected!