The best books I read last year were the "Three Body Problem" books by Cixin Liu.
It's a science fiction series about aliens, space travel and the universe and they're easily the best books I've read in a while.
I genuinely can't remember the last time I got that absorbed in a series. I'd read until the early hours of the morning and sometimes just sit at the edge of my bed for like 20 minutes just contemplating the universe. Highly recommend.
I don't know why, but I could NOT get into it. I read what felt like 2/3 or 3/4 of the first book, and still felt like I had no clue what was going on, and it felt like a difficult slog (for reasons I don't understand), much like how the Silmarillion felt to me. I wish I had enjoyed it, because every review or bit of spoilers I've seen about it sounds like a fantastic story, so I don't understand why it was so unenjoyable to read.
Meanwhile I'll read any chapter of a Neal Stephenson book and feel the comfort of a tea and warm blanket on an (imaginary) dreary day, and never care about the overall plot, and only feel remotely bad about not finishing the book.
No that's perfectly understandable! I actually didn't like the first book either tbh. But the second book and especially the third book were chef's kiss
The dark forest was one of the most popular Fermi solutions long before Liu's books, people just didn't refer to it by that name. Take a look at Fermi paradox Wikipedia article revision history.
I don't think Dark Forest is a good explanation, though. If you were one of the first space-faring civs and meant to avoid competition by striking younger civs preemptively, you could spread von Neumann probes all over the galaxy and either keep new civs at some technology level cap or destroy all the planets right away.
Also, there is no stealth in space, so you can just send a relativistic kill missile to any worlds where civs pop up, without having to step foot outside of your home system.
I love the book, but he didn't solve the Fermi Paradox. Nor did he come up with this explanation.
If that was the question, there would be far simpler answers. Like encryption. An encrypted signal looks like noise. Or point to point communication, which is far more efficient anyway.
The Fermi paradox is also about another question. Why can't we find alien or their artifacts in the solar system? Any species that wants, could, with not much more advanced technology than we have, if it wanted to, essentially settle the entire galaxy in a few million years. von Neumann probes being one of the early ideas for how to do this. Species could do this even in the dark forest situation, but for some reason despite the universe being 13.8 billion years old, no one has bothered to. That's pretty strange!
The dark forest also isn't his invention. He invented the term, but the idea dates back at least to Greg Bear from Forge of God in 1987. He called it a "vicious jungle". Liu Cixin did state it in more game theoretic terms though.
Agreed, I read the 4 of them in 4 days, easy reads, very interesting. I like how 4 (which Cixin Liu recognized as canon despite being a fanfic originally) completed the story vs how it ended in 3.
I was interested in the series until I heard the worldbuilding bit about how the aliens have FTL 12-dimensional supercomputers the size of an atom that can cause hallucinations and interfere with particle accelerators from orbit. Author basically just gave the antagonists god-powers to prove some kind of point about how hopelessly pathetic humans are?
They managed the computers through quantum entanglement.
It's not god powers, imagine 21st century humanity vs middle ages humanity. Like Arthur C. Clarke said, "advanced enough science is no different than magic" or something along those lines.
My understanding was that they sent the computers faster than light while their ships were traveling at sub-lightspeed, or something like that, which is why they could get here and fuck up the planet centuries before their fleet would make it.
My point, though, is that we're making up a fantasy world where the impossible is possible, and a bleak universe isn't more "realistic" than a hopeful one. It bothers me that people try to praise the "realism" in these books. They might as well have just sent Frieza to blow up the planet. It's within the same realm of possibility.
I didn't mind some science fantasy like this. And I like how the author took this step to solve for lag in communication and it added to the speed and thrill of the story.
Interesting read - I thought that the reason the aliens sent the supercomputer probe things ahead of their invasion fleet was because they understood the humans capacity for advancement would far exceed their own capabilities if left unchecked for the duration of the invasion trip, indicating "pathetic" now, but capacity to be far superior.
Devoured all three books - really interesting hard sci-fi, although as noted by others, the first one took a bit of effort to work through.
I don't think it's humans that are hopelessly pathetic, it's just species that are less advanced technologically, mostly because of developing later compared to another species.
It's a science fiction series about aliens, space travel and the universe and they're easily the best books I've read in a while.
I genuinely can't remember the last time I got that absorbed in a series. I'd read until the early hours of the morning and sometimes just sit at the edge of my bed for like 20 minutes just contemplating the universe. Highly recommend.