‘“Dark. It’s so fucking dark,” the captain murmured, and then shot himself.’
****Contains spoilers for The Three Body Problem, the first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, but not for The Dark Forest.****
I always believed in friendly aliens. When I was 8, a teacher showed me Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, and the movie Contact became a family favorite soon after that. I daydreamed about encountering extraterrestrials who would sweep me off onto galactic adventures. When I was 11, I secretly turned the family PC into a SETI node (through the SETI@Home distributed computing project), which caused the computer to run so slowly that my parents had to replace the computer when no proximate cause was found for its performance issues. Sorry, Umma and Dad.
Although I enjoy sci-fi depictions of evil aliens (Alien, Independence Day, and, as previously mentioned, Stargate and its many spin-offs), I’ve never been convinced by them. In my mind, any solution to the Drake Equation is far more likely to yield civilizations that are entirely unlike our own— why should aliens harbor the same obsessions and expansionist tendencies as humans? What would the point of hostility be? Any aliens powerful enough to cross the vast emptiness between stars would have no need for human slaves. I’m a cynic and a pessimist in many other areas, but in this one respect I’ve always been a sunny optimist. Stories like Arrival (Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang), Contact, and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, with challenging and confusing, but ultimately benevolent first contact accounts, ring far truer to me than Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
At least until I read The Dark Forest. The malevolent Trisolaran invasion that we learn about in The Three Body Problem seems, on its face, a straightforward War of the Worlds-style battle over limited resources. Trisolaris’s unstable orbit means that the civilization needs to colonize a new planet—Earth— to survive. But the principles behind inter-civilization relations that are revealed in the final act of the book bring us to an even darker conclusion.
As in the first book, Cixin Liu sets up a series of mysteries that are revealed as the book unfolds. To counter the Trisolaran threat and evade the problem of constant surveillance from the undetectable sophon particles that instantly relay all Earth activities to Trisolaris, Earth establishes the Wallfacer Project. Because the only realm that can be kept secret from Trisolaris is within the human mind, Earth appoints four Wallfacers who are given immense license to plan and execute preparations for the invasion without the need to divulge the true purpose of any of their actions. When every action and communication can be seen by the enemy’s spies, the last refuge of privacy (and thus the opportunity for subterfuge) is within an individual’s unexpressed thoughts.
Three of the Wallfacers, renowned scientists and statesmen, leap into action immediately. So, too, do their Wallbreakers, the enemy agents assigned to unravel their misdirection to uncover their true plans and thus render them ineffective in the long-anticipated Doomsday Battle.
Luo Ji is a failed astronomer-turned-sociology professor and a bit of a playboy. He leads an unremarkable life until he is chosen, unexpectedly, to be the fourth Wallfacer—and a potential savior of humanity. He tries to refuse this burden, but eventually comes to realize that he is the most valuable of the Wallfacers when agents of Trisolaris try to kill him. He must spend his life discovering what makes him so dangerous.
Fair warning here: you will cringe at a lengthy digression about Luo Ji’s past love life and his dream girl. Yes, it’s embarrassing and unnecessary, but power through the shitty dialogue and weirdness. I mentioned last time that The Dark Forest slips away from the nuanced depictions of the inner lives of the key characters found in The Three Body Problem. This is, in part, because The Dark Forest is a comparatively more ambitious novel in scope. No longer concerned with revealing the nature of humanity’s first contact with malignant alien intelligence, Liu moves on to explore how Earth societies will respond to that threat over the course of centuries, not months. Liu introduces the conceit of cryogenic hibernation, which allows for some continuity of characters, but forces him to devise an entirely distinct culture some 200 years in the future, not to mention fill in the gaps with a complete—and harrowing—history of the years that Luo Ji and the reader skip over. It’s not surprising that Liu decides to cut corners on character development and dialogue.
In spite of this weakness, The Dark Forest is a highly worthwhile read. Its vision of a cosmic sociology feels novel. As the tumblers click into place, the payoff is immense. Watching Liu’s vision of a technologically advanced Earth grapple with the weight of history and its choices is both fun and more than a little harrowing. Maybe I’m just exceptionally good at suspending my disbelief, but I truly did not see the ending coming, and even on this second reading I had forgotten enough of the details to make the conclusions feel shocking and satisfying anew.
Dark… it’s so fucking delightfully dark.