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The Three-Body Problem Trilogy by Cixin Liu
(lemmy.ml)
OC text below by @[email protected]
My opinion:
- Interesting concept of a Dark Forest & cosmic sociology axioms.
- Unpleasant characters: Ye Wenjie (narcissistic and psychopathic), Cheng Xin (a kind billionaire lol).
- Disappointing ending—the last few chapters feel weak.
Bonus: Absolutely fascinating interpretation of the first book by @[email protected].
The author can't write people very well and if you're OK with that it's a series with some great concepts. It was interesting to see how a Chinese author thought the US would act in a global emergency in Dark Forest, it was the reverse of a US author assuming everyone would act like the US.
I was pretty annoyed with the wallbreakers concept as it played out because the idea that you'd have some intricate plan involving details about how things would play out in several hundred years and then when someone guesses it you just say "Whelp, guess I'll die" is kind of absurd. Surely you'd just invest in tons of technological development first, see how things shake out, and if someone guesses your plan, abandon it for a new one? Same as in the first book, "Physics is weird, guess I'll die" just seemed bizarre to me.
::: SPOILER SPOILER The wallbreaker stuff is awful, and it gets even worse when you realise that absolutely nothing about Luo Ji's plan benefits from secrecy. Like, all the other wallbreakers are actually doing something that involves trying to deceive Trisolaris, but Luo Ji's idea actually gets more powerful the more people know about it. Ninety percent of the conflict in Dark Forest is solved if he just publicly announces his theory the moment he comes up with it. In fact there's actually a simpler and faster way for him to test his theory than using his Spell, and it prevents the invasion from ever happening, which is just to assume its true and announce his demands. If Trisolaris buys into the hypothesis, they back down, and if they don't then it doesn't actually matter if its true or not. :::
Did you read the books? They’re called Wallfacers. For a reason. The Trisolarans are aware of the plan, otherwise it wouldn’t work.