Planet Earth chooses the greatest minds of their generation to be Wallfacers, including a Venezuelan leader with a nuclear obsession and so hateful of the US that he goes to an analog of the late Osama bin Laden for advice and resources-Osama being an avid fan of Asimov in the book, of course.Įach Wallfacer lives a life of perpetual trickery, where they can use the combined resources of planet Earth for the wildest projects imaginable in order to completely dupe the attacking Trisolarans. Given the power of the Trisolaran sophons to discover any and all Earth secrets, there is only one place left where planet Earth can hide its plans for war: inside a single human mind. The Trisolarans, you see, communicate via a strange form of telepathy, having no idea how to translate a difference in the words “think” and “speak”. The name, perhaps a little difficult to understand in English, is from the Chinese 面壁 (miàn bì), which has a duel meaning of a meditative state and a punishment-like being told to stand in the corner as a child but also to contemplate one’s existence.

Rather than the politics of a society on the brink (and an alien society constantly on the brink), Dark Forest concentrates on a world at war with an unbeatable foe and what that does to the psyche of society and the individual.ĭark Forest begins where the first left off, leaving many of the characters from the first in the dust (or, in fact, diced into tiny pieces), but fans of the first book will be happy to know that Da Shi makes a roaring comeback.īesides the coming war, which is centuries away travelling at a fraction of the speed of light, the true focus of Dark Forest is in the existence of what are termed Wallfacers. Whereas the first in the Three Body trilogy dealt with the politics of the poor wastrel that was humanity in the time of the Cultural Revolution and on to our current cusp of environmental annihilation, Dark Forest is altogether more succinct, more focused. Though, truth be told, Liu’s twists are less like twists than outright emotional abuse-a situation in which he creates a world, convinces you it is real and enduring, and then ceremoniously kicks it to death. With this second astounding work of phantasmagorical, space-age fiction, Liu Cixin has cemented a name for himself in the world of sci-fi as the Asian Asimov.įans of Liu Cixin should be forewarned that the following contains spoilers-even a slight sniff of the page could ruin one of Liu’s famous twists.

Only a few weeks after Dark Forest hit shelves in English, translated by Joel Martinsen, Liu Cixin became the first Chinese person to win the coveted Hugo Award for his Three-Body Problem, the first in the Three Body trilogy.

The dark forest the three body problem