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hooliaquoolia 's review for:
The Dark Forest
by Cixin Liu
I greatly enjoyed The Three-Body Problem, but it took me a little while to start on this sequel. Fortunately it doesn't rely to heavily on the minutiae of the first book, so I was able to pick up the thread of the story without any reference to the first volume. It's an interesting read, especially for someone who hasn't read a lot of "heavy" sci-fi, and the author is clearly orders of magnitude smarter than I will ever be. For readers unfamiliar with his style, a lot of this book will seem overly formal, pretentious even, but for me it fit exactly with the tone the book was going for, and even when the super-smart characters were talking about all their super-smart stuff, I didn't feel lost or left behind.
That being said, this is a huuuuuuge book. It's not Liu's style to use one word when he can use five instead, and it's not his style to use one scene to convey a concept when instead he can spread that concept out over a series of vignettes involving 70 different characters. It would've been easier to follow had this book cut 30% of its content. The sheer volume of scene after scene made a lot of the concepts discussed anti-climactic to me, especially the ultimate reveal of the "dark forest" philosophy (even though it is still an incredibly interesting concept that held my attention and left me still wondering after the end of the book). But the goal of this book is not to be an "easy" read, or to be a tightly-constructed novel, or even to be a linear narrative about a single concept or plot thread. Liu will always be a remarkable author for me, and even if his stories are not the most beautifully constructed works of art in the world, they have made me change the way I look at the night sky, and for that I will always come back to this series with fondness.
That being said, this is a huuuuuuge book. It's not Liu's style to use one word when he can use five instead, and it's not his style to use one scene to convey a concept when instead he can spread that concept out over a series of vignettes involving 70 different characters. It would've been easier to follow had this book cut 30% of its content. The sheer volume of scene after scene made a lot of the concepts discussed anti-climactic to me, especially the ultimate reveal of the "dark forest" philosophy (even though it is still an incredibly interesting concept that held my attention and left me still wondering after the end of the book). But the goal of this book is not to be an "easy" read, or to be a tightly-constructed novel, or even to be a linear narrative about a single concept or plot thread. Liu will always be a remarkable author for me, and even if his stories are not the most beautifully constructed works of art in the world, they have made me change the way I look at the night sky, and for that I will always come back to this series with fondness.