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spiff11 's review for:
The Dark Forest
by Cixin Liu
This has all the style of a Wikipedia entry with none of its succinctness. There are many instances where Liu goes into excruciating detail on things that don't matter. The specific example I had in mind was the droplet attack, where he goes into detail about precise minutae like how long certain actions take. However, none of it really evokes anything because he's approaching the attack with the cold perception of an engineer, when a more painterly brush can convey the scene in much more vivid horror and despair. While it does a good job drawing the scene, he fails to make any emotional impact felt besides the baseline emotions inherent to witnessing any massacre. This approach further extends to his worldbuilding, where there's a lot of description of future tech, but none of it really means anything besides being set dressing. It's all very surface level, which means that I have a good mental image of what the world looks like, but don't really have a sense what it's actually like to live there.
The characters, as with Three Body Problem, all speak with the same voice and seemingly the same intonation. I never get a sense of their emotional state from their words because they are bereft of all personality and all speak like robots.
The pacing feels off. You don't learn about the central premise of the Wallfacers until about 20 percent into the book, so I'm left reading about all these characters, but without much of a driving force behind their actions. The premise itself is solid, but it never really feels developed until certain points where their plans, which are all very simplistic and sorta silly, are exposed.
The bad pacing is further exacerbated by my personal pet peeve of protagonists who refuse to engage with the story. For huge swathes of the book, Luo Ji just doesn't do anything. I don't think he takes his role seriously until about halfway through. In the meantime, we get random creepy sequences of him going on dates with an imaginary girlfriend, who gets handwaved into magically being an actual person that Shi Qiang finds "somehow." It all feels like a really weird wish fulfillment fantasy of a sad, lonely man. Instead of engaging with any sort of romance (or giving Yan much of a character), it just smash cuts to them being married with a kid. It's all just really bizarre, and I'd say it's the most bizarre part of the book except there's a random scene where the the Taliban is praised and Osama Bin Laden is given some modicum of respect.
The "All is lost" moment hits at around 90 percent of the book, which makes the eventual resolution to the major conflict feel incredibly rushed and unsatisfying. Luo Ji's plan itself feels like an afterthought, especially since it wasn't exactly set up well. For a premise that's based on deception and lends itself to the sort of mind games that make for the best espionage thrillers, everything just feels so straightforward and boring. There are no layers of intrigue here, no "I did it 15 minutes ago" moments. Just random narrative dead ends (i.e., the Imprinted and arguably even the Zhang Beihei subplot) culminating in a sudden resolution that leaves me going "That's it?"
The characters, as with Three Body Problem, all speak with the same voice and seemingly the same intonation. I never get a sense of their emotional state from their words because they are bereft of all personality and all speak like robots.
The pacing feels off. You don't learn about the central premise of the Wallfacers until about 20 percent into the book, so I'm left reading about all these characters, but without much of a driving force behind their actions. The premise itself is solid, but it never really feels developed until certain points where their plans, which are all very simplistic and sorta silly, are exposed.
The bad pacing is further exacerbated by my personal pet peeve of protagonists who refuse to engage with the story. For huge swathes of the book, Luo Ji just doesn't do anything. I don't think he takes his role seriously until about halfway through. In the meantime, we get random creepy sequences of him going on dates with an imaginary girlfriend, who gets handwaved into magically being an actual person that Shi Qiang finds "somehow." It all feels like a really weird wish fulfillment fantasy of a sad, lonely man. Instead of engaging with any sort of romance (or giving Yan much of a character), it just smash cuts to them being married with a kid. It's all just really bizarre, and I'd say it's the most bizarre part of the book except there's a random scene where the the Taliban is praised and Osama Bin Laden is given some modicum of respect.
The "All is lost" moment hits at around 90 percent of the book, which makes the eventual resolution to the major conflict feel incredibly rushed and unsatisfying. Luo Ji's plan itself feels like an afterthought, especially since it wasn't exactly set up well. For a premise that's based on deception and lends itself to the sort of mind games that make for the best espionage thrillers, everything just feels so straightforward and boring. There are no layers of intrigue here, no "I did it 15 minutes ago" moments. Just random narrative dead ends (i.e., the Imprinted and arguably even the Zhang Beihei subplot) culminating in a sudden resolution that leaves me going "That's it?"