I am very behind on my blogging. It took me a long time to get through these two books, but I watched the first season of the 3-body problem series and decided I should read the other two books. I read these from June to August and am just getting around to posting about it now as I’ve been quite busy with my real job.
This was a challenging read. I’ve had a lot of travel this summer and listened to both of these on planes, in hotels, in college dorm rooms, and walking around. That may have been part of why it was challenging, but I don’t think it was the main reason. These are complex books, written an a non-Western style. Certainly book one felt that way… as seen in my blog post, it was a real slog. Looking back on that post, I don’t feel like these two books were as difficult. Maybe because I better understood what was going on, and actually, almost certainly because I was listening to the audio book which allowed me to differentiate the characters names and voices a lot better.
I’m not going to try to rehash the plot much. The Trisolarans have limited our technology with their advanced technology, and their invasion force is heading our way. We are certain to fail. The wallfacer project, designed to fight them, is not working, and it seems we are doomed. At the very end of the Dark Forest, we discover a way to possibly prevent the attack, but along with that, we learn a lot more about the universe. Death’s End continues the story, and it gets really bad for humanity before it gets better. And then the ending. The last 20% of the book I found extremely disappointing and unsatisfying, and I really didn’t like the ending.
So much so, that I was going to rate these two books 2-stars, but fortunately for me, I found this blog post which explains the ending of the series in a satisfying way. It goes back to what I was writing about in the 3-body problem: the literary differences between “Eastern” and “Western” fiction. The short (simplified) version is that Western fiction is linear and Eastern is cyclical (not circular). And that was enough to change my mind on this whole series.
The other difficulty in this series is the long, lyrical sections that seem almost completely separated from the rest of the narrative. As an example, the first chapter of the Dark Forest is (you fairly quickly find out) about an ant. An ant who happens to overhear the birth of an academic discipline on alien sociology. But it isn’t for hundreds of pages later (and a revisit of an ant or another bug… I forget) that we understand how important that first chapter was for the plot of the two books. The first chapter of the third book starts with the seige of Constantinople and ends millions of years in the future (which is evident from the Table of Contents). However, the Constantinople story does work its way in to the rest of the narrative, much later.
This is an extremely complex book series with a lot of characters and a huge amount of both time and space is covered. But the book explains the Fermi Paradox. Why, in a galaxy that must have more life than just us, have we not heard from anyone? It’s because of the dark forest. There is some really rich innovation in this series.
I feel like I owe it to myself to someday reread these books. Now that I know the plot and the overall structure, I am sure that a lot of the imagery and metaphor will make more sense to me on a re-read. But at 18-22 hours long each, these three books are a real commitment, and it may not be one I am willing to make again.
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