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Sep. 13th, 2015 10:16 amCixin Liu's The Dark Forest, the sequel to his Hugo Award winning The Three Body Problem, is pretty clearly indebted to Isaac Asimov's Foundation- in one of the most bizarre and memorable scenes, one of the Foundation-like 'Wallfacers' meets Osama bin Laden, and asks him to become Hari Seldon. (TDF was written in 2006, and there are a few anachronisms like that one, though none quite as unsettling.)
Humanity's primary response to the threat posed by the scientifically superior aliens discovered at the end of The Three Body Problem is to appoint a group of visionary leaders, the Wallfacers. Their job is to come up with secret paradigm-breaking plans to defeat the aliens, who, it is revealed, are able to monitor all communications on Earth, but cannot discern the inner thoughts and motives of individual people. In a Kafkaesque touch, it is not revealed who chose the Wallfacers, or why they were chosen, but they are publicly announced and then given responsibility to devise and manage, with the help of SFnal hibernation, a 400 year plan to prepare humanity to fight the Trisolarians without revealing what that plan is to the Trisolarian sophons.
The combination of the Kafkaesque surreality of the Wallfacer program and the explicit Foundation callbacks led me to expect the revelation of a Second Foundation in the novel's payoff. The hunt for the secret plans beneath the Wallfacers' visible actions drives most of the novel's suspense... it is a puzzle story very much in the Asimov vein, with clues hidden for the reader to try to piece together the answers to the puzzles. And it is satisfying in the same ways.
What distinguishes The Dark Forest from Foundation is Liu's use of real world politics instead of the Gibbons-y Space Rome of Asimov. The political puzzles Liu is concerned with don't deal with defections from Trantor but with the tension between the First World and the Third World, with the rivalry between China and the West, with the struggle of the United Nations to create a world leadership. And they deal with questions of modern day political philosophy like the meaning of terrorism, the role of propaganda and ideology in governance, the responsibilities of service to one's nation.
For all these reasons, and because the characters seem much more like people than like humorless robots, I enjoyed The Dark Forest a lot more than I enjoyed The Three Body Problem.
I liked Luo Ji, whose response to knowing that the world is ending is to try to gain as much personal enjoyment out of his family as possible, even abdicating his responsibility to the world to do so, and I liked that Liu got to play that off against the ambiguous possibility that this was somehow part of a Wallfacer plan.
I liked Zhang Beihai's quiet struggle against his father's legacy and his ultimate and tragic vindication of the Second Foundation. I was moved by his offer to accept the burden of the Battle of the Darkness to protect those who served under him, even though they had doubted him at every turn.
And I loved the time-interrupted ark of Shi Qiang and his son, who grew into maturity and fellowship in spite of betrayals and false starts, because of a genuine love that bound them together.
The character dramas, the family stories, all of that worked so much better for me this time around, and more than the ideas they are the reason I liked this book much more.
And I liked the idea that somehow Ye Wenjie, the hero of 3BP, has somehow incepted all of the events of this novel, that she is the visionary who, after starting all this trouble thirty years earlier, figures out a secret century-spanning plan to put an end to the conflict and lead Luo Ji and humanity toward a new cosmic sociology built on love and community instead of on fear. I have no idea what book 3 of the series will be about, and I'm honestly not really looking forward to seeing Ken Liu take another crack at the translation process, but I'm hopeful Ye Wenjie will be a part of the narrative again.
Humanity's primary response to the threat posed by the scientifically superior aliens discovered at the end of The Three Body Problem is to appoint a group of visionary leaders, the Wallfacers. Their job is to come up with secret paradigm-breaking plans to defeat the aliens, who, it is revealed, are able to monitor all communications on Earth, but cannot discern the inner thoughts and motives of individual people. In a Kafkaesque touch, it is not revealed who chose the Wallfacers, or why they were chosen, but they are publicly announced and then given responsibility to devise and manage, with the help of SFnal hibernation, a 400 year plan to prepare humanity to fight the Trisolarians without revealing what that plan is to the Trisolarian sophons.
The combination of the Kafkaesque surreality of the Wallfacer program and the explicit Foundation callbacks led me to expect the revelation of a Second Foundation in the novel's payoff. The hunt for the secret plans beneath the Wallfacers' visible actions drives most of the novel's suspense... it is a puzzle story very much in the Asimov vein, with clues hidden for the reader to try to piece together the answers to the puzzles. And it is satisfying in the same ways.
What distinguishes The Dark Forest from Foundation is Liu's use of real world politics instead of the Gibbons-y Space Rome of Asimov. The political puzzles Liu is concerned with don't deal with defections from Trantor but with the tension between the First World and the Third World, with the rivalry between China and the West, with the struggle of the United Nations to create a world leadership. And they deal with questions of modern day political philosophy like the meaning of terrorism, the role of propaganda and ideology in governance, the responsibilities of service to one's nation.
For all these reasons, and because the characters seem much more like people than like humorless robots, I enjoyed The Dark Forest a lot more than I enjoyed The Three Body Problem.
I liked Luo Ji, whose response to knowing that the world is ending is to try to gain as much personal enjoyment out of his family as possible, even abdicating his responsibility to the world to do so, and I liked that Liu got to play that off against the ambiguous possibility that this was somehow part of a Wallfacer plan.
I liked Zhang Beihai's quiet struggle against his father's legacy and his ultimate and tragic vindication of the Second Foundation. I was moved by his offer to accept the burden of the Battle of the Darkness to protect those who served under him, even though they had doubted him at every turn.
And I loved the time-interrupted ark of Shi Qiang and his son, who grew into maturity and fellowship in spite of betrayals and false starts, because of a genuine love that bound them together.
The character dramas, the family stories, all of that worked so much better for me this time around, and more than the ideas they are the reason I liked this book much more.
And I liked the idea that somehow Ye Wenjie, the hero of 3BP, has somehow incepted all of the events of this novel, that she is the visionary who, after starting all this trouble thirty years earlier, figures out a secret century-spanning plan to put an end to the conflict and lead Luo Ji and humanity toward a new cosmic sociology built on love and community instead of on fear. I have no idea what book 3 of the series will be about, and I'm honestly not really looking forward to seeing Ken Liu take another crack at the translation process, but I'm hopeful Ye Wenjie will be a part of the narrative again.