The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest (黑暗森林 / Hēi'àn sēnlín) is the second novel in Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The Three-Body Problem was a good read but I think this one had even more deliberation put into it, making it feel like an important work of science fiction, mainly because of it coining cosmic sociology. The sole thing I didn't like in the novel was the viewpoint of a Chinese navy officer Zhang Beihai whom I thought boring and the little payoff at the end not worth it for the time spent on following him.

In the previous novel, an extraterrestrial civilization four light years away from Earth was made contact with. They were dubbed Trisolarans for the triple star system, Alpha Centauri, their planet chaotically orbits which severely prohibits their capability to prosper. Trisolar turned out to be hostile, seeing Earth as a stable paradise to be conquered, and sent an invasion fleet. Despite being technologically far more advanced than humankind, they are still capable of traveling only at a fraction of the speed of light, thus the journey taking over four centuries, in theory giving Earth enough time to catch up and face Trisolar on a more equal footing.

To prevent the latter from happening, Trisolar with great difficulty started building the sophons I mentioned in the post about the previous novel. The sophons are 11-dimensional computers that in three dimensions are merely the size of a proton. Thus they can travel at lightspeed to reach Earth far quicker. With quantum entanglement they are a device of instantaneous communication and espionage. They are also capable of causing minor hallucinations on humans and disrupting particle accelerators to give random results, essentially placing a wall in front of humankind's advancement.

Via the sophons Trisolarans made contact with people who are willing to undermine humankind's resistance. They founded a secret Earth-Trisolar Organization for that task. I found it slightly perplexing that such individuals could be found in large numbers but I guess there are billions of people on the planet and the viewpoint of Ye Wenjie showed an example how one could end up with such an attitude.

ETO is an important fifth column ally for Trisolar as they don't quite understand humans. Trisolarans have evolved in such a way that their normal communication is always open; they radiate all their thoughts to everyone around. This extends to their communication culture via technology and they initially provided ETO with way more information than necessary before learning that humans wouldn't do that. ETO of course saved all that information which was then acquired by everyone else in an operation against ETO's big financier at the end of The Three-Body Problem.

In The Dark Forest, the United Nations come to the conclusion, that since the sophons are spying everywhere, the only place to form a defense strategy in secret against the eventually arriving Trisolarans is inside one's mind. The Wallfacers program is initiated and four people are chosen, each to come up with something. Their doings are not to be questioned -- as everything could be a part of their plan -- and the only limitation they have is that their demand for resources can't be unreasonably high for the rest of the humankind to bear.

If the first novel reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke's works, is this one more like Isaac Asimov's: the Wallfacers and cosmic sociology in particular reminded me of psychohistory in the Foundation series. Liu even openly references Asimov when one of the Wallfacers, former US Secretary of Defense Frederick Tyler, travels to Afghanistan in search of suicide pilots. He comes bearing a gift of Arabic translations of Foundation's sequels and prequels, stating he wants the person he's meeting to become Hari Seldon. The person's name is never stated but I assume he's meant to be Osama bin Laden. (The Dark Forest was published in 2008 which was before bin Laden's death in 2011.) Apparently it is theorized that bin Laden was inspired by Foundation. In this novel he has only read the original trilogy and correctly guesses that Seldon's plan doesn't succeed though he does still find it surprising. He also turns down Tyler's proposition, stating that they bear no hatred towards Trisolarans.

Like Tyler, two other Wallfacers are also from a background you'd expect such a person to be: Manuel Rey Diaz is the former president of Venezuela who successfully repelled the United States in some conflict, while Bill Hines is an English neuroscientist and the former president of the European Union. (Liu didn't predict Brexit happening, I guess.)

The fourth Wallfacer is a wild card: Luo Ji is an astronomer and sociologist who has no idea why he was picked. He tries to turn down the job immediately but it's no use. So instead he uses his new position to make his own life comfortable, arranging himself a house in a beautiful, isolated location and a woman of his dreams to live with him. The UN doesn't know why Luo Ji needed to be picked either but since ETO is trying to kill him really hard, it must've been the right choice. (Luckily my favorite character from the previous book already, Big Shi, is there to save Luo every time.) They do eventually get tired of Luo sitting on his ass though and force him to start working.

As a reader you do have some idea why Luo is the most important Wallfacer. In the prologue he has a short conversation with his late friend's mother, Ye Wenjie, who suggests Luo to start on a new field of study: cosmic sociology. Since studying civilizations of the Universe or even just the Milky Way is not a realistic thing (and Trisolaris wasn't even known to Luo at that point), cosmic sociology has to be purely theoretical in nature. To get Luo started, Ye gives him two axioms to work with:

1. Survival is the primary goal of civilizations.

2. Civilizations continuously grow and expand, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

She also drops two important concepts to consider: chains of suspicion and technological explosion. After that, cosmic sociology is moved to the background of the novel, only returned to once the UN kicks Luo's ass moving. Luo realizes he's been working on a theory all this time and actually starts thinking how the Trisolaran threat can be countered.

Luo's conclusion is the novel's title, the Dark Forest theory which is one of the possible explanations to the Fermi paradox: extraterrestrial civilizations, more advanced than ours included, are likely to exist yet we haven't had any contact -- why? I won't describe Luo's theory further but it sure makes one think that sending road signs out into space on Voyagers and whatnots to point the way to Earth, maybe isn't the smartest idea.

I wonder how the trilogy concludes. I guess the Trisolarans arrive finally but what will happen then?