It's like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.
-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the 'friends' act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They're constantly insulting or hitting each other. It's just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.
-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they've essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.
-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.
-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.
I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.
Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the 'friends' act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They're constantly insulting or hitting each other. It's just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people?
I don't know if they all go to the same writing school but my hypothesis is that this is how writing schools are teaching everyone to write stories these days. It's everywhere.
My money is on it being focus group/analysis/exec driven. Makes more sense as a common denominator.
Could also be because the showrunners are Benioff and Weiss, who got addicted to cliffhangers and shock value to keep increasing Game of Thrones viewership.
I blame the MCU for this. It was always a thing, but the Marvel movies turned it up to 11 and made bank off it
Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people
Yes, the data from Netflix's user base and algorithm basically writes the episodes. That's how Netflix's version of House Of Cards with Kevin Spacey was made. They just jammed all the most popular stuff, according to Netflix user data, into one show, and that's how House Of Cards was mad. That's why all these similarities in Netflix shows exist. With AI it's just going to get worse. We're officially in the era of algorithically driven shows.
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None of the 'friends' act like friends.
nobody remembers what friends were like
It's bad folks
The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season . This is not an exaggeration.
Yeah. The books jump around in time a lot between the present and future, so they're doing all the whole series more chronologically with the book 2/3 protagonists' stories happening concurrently with the first book story.
But also yeah it's moving along very very quickly.
The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season .
Average nextfix series moment
Taking your time and letting themes and events play out instead of jumping straight to the universe exploding is a concept alien to Anglo screenwriters
To be fair on that point, the pacing of the books also feels very fast.
I could watch it, but the pacing really is a problem. The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about. Also, really egregious use of CGI for things they really shouldn't have to use it for. The not being able to afford extras thing seems very apparent there as well. In an army of 30 million of course you're going to have to use CGI, but standard practice would be to have the first rank of soldiers - the ones really close to the camera - be played by real people. No such luck here I'm afraid.
The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about.
The new Percy Jackson series did this too. There is lots to praise about the new adaptation, but the plot feels rushed, propelled forth by characters having sudden realisations multiple times per episode.
The rehydration scene is supposed to feature millions of Trisolarans. There's like 10 on screen.
They did have the millions of soldiers for the computer lol, but the rehydration scene was just an excuse to
afaic
I've looked up what the ending of the books is and it sounds like the main conflict is resolved via deus ex machina and then everyone dies anyway so nothing that happened mattered at all
Yup. And the only reason any of the plot can even happen is totally bogus space magic that's so silly you can't even call it soft sci-fi. I gave up after the first book, and I really have nothing good to say about it. I've heard people opine that it was a lot of people's first science fiction book the same way Harry Potter was a lot of kids first fantasy adventure book, and that's why it had such an impact.
Yeah I hear it's about collapsing spatial dimensions as if reality itself is a perfect 1:1 copy of our simplified understanding of it (math) and it's done with technology that's super advanced so it never has to actually be described or follow conservation of energy or anything
Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they'll do the same to you
Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they'll do the same to you
I see this take all the time here, and then when I (a person who read the book) counter that it's a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the evil
TrisolaransAmerican Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel) white people yell at me for being some kind of asian chauvinist.I have a theory that Westerners from the imperial core think of the Dark Forest and automatically put themselves in the Trisolarian imperialist POV, and are ideologically incapable of switching that POV to the side of the victims of imperialism. That’s the only way I can explain how they could have come away with that conclusion.
Nah, I'm not gonna be as uncharitable as all that (beyond the snark in my original post). Online western leftists have diegetic essentialism built into them as a survival mechanism, so when chuds deliberately push their reading of dark forest theory (and to be fair, it is very easy to see how Game Theory Law of the Jungle, Kill or Be Killed can be read that way) it sets off their Hitler particle detectors. I don't blame them as it's probably the most common take they'd encounter online.
The defensive realpolitik 'Keep your Head Down' reading is only apparent if you're familiar with China's recent history and foreign policy decisions post-Deng.
Are you up to date with internal Chinese geopolitical thought? Is the US's stupid aggression on Taiwan and the self defeating trade war being viewed as a refutation of the idea that tbp is apparently putting forth that China could "keep it's head down" ?
You haven’t read the second book, which went precisely into this.
Book 2 massive spoiler
Humanity became over-confident and thought they had overtaken the Trisolarians despite the technological sanctions, and started to perceive the Trisolarians as making all kinds of stupid mistakes. Maybe now it’s a good time to negotiate peace with them. All will go well, right?
The book is a cautionary tale about misreading intentions. The US imperialism is not something to be taken lightly. They have far more powerful weapons than just military prowess. I cringe everytime I read here that people think the US is going to collapse soon. The US would rather bring the whole world down than to collapse by itself. Being prudent and careful is key to dealing with the US imperialists.
Also, to cover all my bases: Chinese foreign policy has shifted rather significantly under Xi Jinping to a more active role. Please remember that the Three Body Problem was published in 2008. Also, and this really goes without saying- it reflects the views and fears of the author only, and all that entails. Whether the allegory is as relevant now as it was when it was published is a separate matter of discussion.
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The part I don't get is the response - flee, fight, infiltrate, asimilate, but hiding from us aggression isn't possible. Plus, like... the US can't do what happens in TBP. Murder and genocide, yes, but the fickle, unstable, easily bored empire is constantly getting pushed back or defeated by nations that are vastly weaker on paper.
If tbp is supposed to endorse trying to "hide" from America all I can really come up with is that the author grossly and terrifyingly fails to understand the source and goals of american aggression.
And another thing - the trisolarans are fucked. They're fleeing their ultra-hostile home system where their annihilation could happen at any moment due to the orbital pattern of their stars. They need to leave, and once they leave they need to conquer earth because they have no where else go go.
The USA is very much the opposite. It's a natural fortress that has all or almost all of the resources needed to maintain itself indefinitely located within it's own borders. US imperialism is premised on the Capitalist drive for infinite profit. We're after cheap resources and cheap labor. If it weren't for the US's imperialist ideology the US could quite comfortably fort up in North America for a very long time.
The Trisolarans aren't an Imperialist power the way such powers exist on earth. There have been a few armies of exiles that have shown up somewhere, wrecked the place, and taken over but that's not the state of politics on earth and never was on any scale. The Trisolarans have a survival imperative that provides a justification within the story for their zero-sum, all or nothing invasion of Earth.
The equivalent of that in America is the
infesting our leadership, not any actually existing material problems. The only real barrier to, if not some utopian friendship, at least peaceful coexistence with China is our economic system. We overthrow capitalism, the primary motivation for conflict falls away.the author grossly and terrifyingly fails to understand the source and goals of american aggression.
The author doesn't care about the source or goals of american aggression. The author is more concerned about the effects of american aggression on his country. The author is Chinese and familiar with Chinese history, and is also aware of what happened to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn't want that devastation visited upon his country, so he wrote a sci-fi parable about the wisdom of Dengist foreign policy and the dangers of discarding that foreign policy and attracting american imperial attention before military technological parity was achieved.
I'm sorry, this turned in to a diatribe. I'm really, really, really frightened and it mostly stays buried under a layer of cynicism and irony and distraction, but it broke through here. I'm terrified of this awful country.
Original post follows;
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
It is essential to victory to understand what your enemy is doing, why they are doing it, and why they think they are doing it.
America's aggression is not based in what most people would consider rational thought. Americans are so utterly, blindly, deludedly convinced of their natural and divine superiority that most of them are not able to conceive of "military parity". MAD was only barely able to contain US aggression and avert a general nuclear exchange. If even a few dozen government and military positions had been occupied by different men America would have committed to a full launch and considered the destruction of most of America's population and much of the world an acceptable price for destroying the Soviets and Chinese.
America cannot accurately perceive China's defensive capabilities. It cannot accurately perceive it's own vulnerabilities. It will launch in to a war it can't win out of sheer arrogance and bloodlust. Normally an enemy like that would be easily defeated, but America's second strike capability and outright insanity makes defeating America in open combat suicidal. China might reach a point where they could destroy the us carrier fleet, there's a good chance they already can. But if they can't kill the entire nuclear triad in an overwhelming first strike they're flipping coins on annihilation.
America is something new in history - the blind mad bloodlust of fascism armed with a nuclear second strike capability that could destroy every major population center in china.
So that's what i don't understand. How any of the attitudes and actions in tbp could constitute a defense against America. I get that this is an old book, and with Obama coming on to the stage at that time it was easy to be misled about the beast and maybe think that change was possible, but it seems hopelessly naive. America doesn't kill for self defense, or for resources. Killing is what America is. It's a self sharpening weapon with no master that destroys because that is it's nature. You can't hide from that, or turtle up behind walls. If defense is even possible you must infect it with something that will cause it to rot from inside and collapse, and hope that in collapsing it doesn't crush the whole world, or else kill it completely in a single moment of overwhelming violence that leaves nothing left alive to retaliate. I don't see any wisdom or strategy in what Liu Cixin is discussing. It's all premised on game theory, rational self interest, and that does not apply to America. This is a strategy for dealing with a wolf, but they're facing a rabid dog.
I don't know if you live here, or deal with Americans, but the thrill and the joy in their voices when they, unprompted, begin talking about how many hundreds of millions or billions they could kill if only they could destroy the Three Gorges Dam or interdict the Malacca Strait is horrifying. I don't have words for it and I'm terrified that the rest of the world doesn't understand what we are.
The Trisolarians are not the Americans. They are a metaphor for Imperial Japan (only 4 light years away), a weak imperialist power in a sea of even stronger imperialists who are trying to wipe each other out. (Note: in China, it is not controversial at all to see the Soviet Union as “imperialist”. That’s just how it is commonly perceived as part of the SIno-Soviet relationship, as China sees itself as being stuck in a global confrontation between the US and the USSR. This is why I said, this is a story that is written from the Chinese perspective, not from a Western imperialist perspective like many others.)
质子 (proton) is pronounced exactly the same as 智子 (sophon, or Tomoko, a Japanese female name) gave it away.
Japan underwent modernization in the late 19th century, narrowly avoided the fate of being colonized by Western powers and instead found themselves among the ranks of imperialist powers, driven by the need of resource expansion to colonize China.
Once again, you are trying to take everything at face value rather than exploring the deeper meanings of the story and the philosophical questions that the author is trying to provoke. This is not something you can get from just reading wikipedia pages lol.
One of the most important lines in the Dark Forest:
给岁月以文明，而不是给文明以岁月。
This was how it was translated into English:
Make time for civilization, for civilization won’t make time.
I don’t know how well the translation went over people’s heads, but the point it is trying to provoke is, what is Humanity? If the universe is a hostile Dark Forest state, do we prioritize survival even if it means losing our Humanity? The author has his own predilection, but it doesn’t make the questions less provocative.
If the only way to survive in the world of harsh capitalism is to join the imperialist ranks (that includes the Soviet Union from the Chinese perspective, mind you, though I don’t agree with that labeling), then what is better: to survive at the cost of Humanity that defines us in the first place, or to preserve Humanity at all cost, even if it means this will lead to our own demise?
The title of Book 3 is translated as “Death’s End”, but in Chinese it is called 《死神永生》, which more accurately should be translated to something like “The God of Death is Eternal”.
spoiler for Book 3
The third book went much further that spanned the entire timeline until the end of the Universe. Big fish, small fish (big imperialists, small imperialists) - at the end of time they are nothing more than a speck of dust in the universe. Nobody can escape the God of Death.
And if that’s the case, is there a point to prolonging our survival, at the cost of all the traits that define us as Humanity to begin with?
So, make time for civilization, for civilization won’t make time.
Again, you cannot just read wikipedia and say that you know it all. It’s just fiction at the end of the day, but the point is to think about the questions it’s trying to provoke.
Japan underwent modernization in the late 19th century, narrowly avoided the fate of being colonized by Western powers and instead found themselves among the ranks of imperialist powers, driven by the need of resource expansion to colonize China.
Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?
If the only way to survive in the world of harsh capitalism is to join the imperialist ranks (that includes the Soviet Union from the Chinese perspective, mind you, though I don’t agree with that labeling), then what is better: to survive at the cost of Humanity that defines us in the first place, or to preserve Humanity at all cost, even if it means this will lead to our own demise?
Is it accurate to say that the books can be read as an interrogation of recent Chinese history (from a modern, maybe somewhat liberal perspective), and it's trajectory? I haven't read books 2 & 3 to comment on them further.
Okay, true, frequently encountered issue with trying to portray America realistically in fiction.
I'll fully cop to not having read the book and thus not knowing about the nuances, but Dark Forest existed as a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox well before Three Body Problem was written, and I really do think people need to examine the mindset that leads someone to theorize that the reason we don't hear from other civilizations is that any attempts to contact another one results in immediate annihilation. This shit doesn't form in a vacuum.
It just sounds like there's enough little nitpicky things in the books that they'll bother me, and I don't need my brain chasing down more loose ends to ruminate over. I am still pissed about how shitty His Dark Materials was after hearing all the praise it got, and it's been damn near 20 years. I can't get those plot holes out of my head. Parts of me are still mad at them.
Cringe? Maybe. I don't really give a fuck if people think I'm cringe anymore.
Hey, look, as a person living in a glass house I'm not about to just start throwing cringe stones everywhere, but imo I think we should be really clear on whether we're discussing the Three Body Problem (the book/tv show) or The Dark Forest Theory (the thought experiment), because there absolutely are legitimate criticisms of both of those things, but we kinda need to be careful not to conflate the two, because the chief concern of the book is the question "Is it possible for China to not get colonised by a technologically superior foe?", which is somewhat related but quite a bit different from the "The Reason we don't hear from aliens is because everyone's really mean".
This is really more of a meta-discussion about the things people say about the book. I'm in no position to actually criticize the book, just the things I've heard about it that make it sound unappealing to me. I don't really know what the book's ideological bent is, but the way I've seen it marketed and discussed is "Dark Forest Theory: The Book (now extra depressing!)" so it's understandable people unfamiliar with it would conflate the two
I do think Dark Forest is total horseshit, tbh. Feels way too simplistic and just takes it as a given that relativistic weaponry is possible, practical, and can't be countered, and seems to think launching a civilization-scale attack across interstellar distances is not something that would signal your presence to other civilizations. Don't send radio signals! Things that wipe out entire solar systems? Very smart to send, probably nobody will notice. Like, what happens when the Trisolarans successfully invade? An entire species loading up into ships and hurling themselves at sublight in a linear direction isn't something others would notice? What happens when the Quadsolarans show up and use their superiorior super-technology to beat them up? Then the Pentasolarans and on and on in a DBZ-esque power creep forever and ever? Maybe I'm just being a smartass about it but it feels like it doesn't hold water to me.
This is really more of a meta-discussion about the things people say about the book.
Ok? But the things people are saying about the book are wrong tho, either because we're going on hearsay or because of misreading of the text (deliberate or otherwise) and what it is trying to say. Dark Forest Theory as it's used in The Three Body Problem is a sci-fi narrative framing device to discuss US-China relations, and imo I don't think the book is particularly interested in exploring the idea beyond that allegorical framing.
Dark Forest is total horseshit
Oh yeah totally I agree with you on that. I don't think any sufficiently advanced civilization can advance beyond their solar system without communism, and once a civilization is capable of interstellar travel they probably are capable of defending themselves from extinction anyway.
(Also I think the scenario you outline happens in the books but I haven't read that far yet.)
I just saw something that happens in the book called out for this. A dude sends a radio signal from a star to test the "dark forest". The star blows up, so they decide yes, the dark forest is in effect. But the obvious problem is that the attackers don't do any follow up. They don't scout the star to see if anyone is actually there, they don't treat it as a potential trap by the dark forest predator they're supposed to be hiding from. If you shoot a giant relativistic or ftl or magic weapon at someone and you don't kill all of them at the same time they'll just follow the line of your weapon back to you and either counter-attack and wipe you out, or broad-band your position to everyone else so you get wiped out anyway.
The solution to the Dark Forest is War Games: the only winning move is not to play. The book seems like it's trying to engage with nuclear deterrence and MAD is some way, but then forgets about second-strike weapons - nuclear missile armed submarines - that are the foundation on which MAD rests. If second-strike weapons exist you can't do silly shit like this. Maybe it's supposed to make some kind of sense in the silly space-magic of the book, but irl the us can't destroy China without destroying itself and the whole world.
Like, what happens when the Trisolarans successfully invade?
Id recommend reading the books for this part, its a harrowing space battle.
Maybe that's why I didn't get it. Trying to keep your head down and not draw the US's ire is the worst possible way to deal with a belligerent facist power engaged in a zero-sum game of world domination. Also, the relationship is radically different - the us and china are primary trade partners, Earth uses multiple layers of MAD as nuclear deterrent, we can literally go visit each other whenever.
Like i don't really get what the author was going for how can China hide from the US? How does the relationship between earth and the trisolarans map to the us/china relationship at all?
Ok I'll elaborate but don't get mad at me for pointing out things that are kinda obvious from an asian perspective that seemingly alot of western commentators miss/overlook. I'm also not going to claim to be an expert on Chinese foreign policy.
Trying to keep your head down and not draw the US's ire is the worst possible way to deal with a belligerent facist power engaged in a zero-sum game of world domination.
Ah, yes, which is famously why China has gone to war with the United States to establish global communism in the time since the Korean War. To quote Deng Xiaoping, Chinese foreign policy since the 1980's has been “biding our time and hiding our capabilities”. Actually pertinent leftist criticism of Dengism and China has been the amount (or lack thereof) of support for socialist causes/states, especially post Sino-Soviet split. Ask yourself: if China is socialist, why are the us and china trade partners? Shouldn't principled communists fight to end capitalism at every turn? (And to be clear so I don't get mistaken for an ultra: there are very good reasons for China embarking on the the path it has taken. But this is still a valid criticism.)
How does the relationship between earth and the trisolarans map to the us/china relationship at all?
It needs to be stated that China has had a long history of being the victim of colonial powers. The Century of Humiliation is as important context for this work as the Cultural Revolution, and much of the driving force that created the Chinese Communist Party and fuels Chinese nationalism to this day is the desire to avoid a repeat of that dark time. The Dark Forest Theory as it is presented in the book is meant to be approached from the defender's side: is it wise to bide our time and hide our capabilities? Is it enough?
It's a Sci-fi allegory to frame the question: "Is it possible for a technologically inferior nation to avoid colonization by a technologically superior one, and if so how?"
I think it goes without saying that a Chinese author might give a pessimistic answer.
Also, to cover all my bases: Chinese foreign policy has shifted rather significantly under Xi Jinping to a more active role. Please remember that the Three Body Problem was published in 2008. Also, and this should really go without saying- it reflects the views and fears of the author only, and all that entails. Whether the allegory is as relevant now as it was when it was published is a separate matter of discussion.
Just speaking on the first book (I haven't finished books 2 & 3):
-
The main antagonist is a comprador who gets disillusioned with communism and sells out her
countryplanet. -
The Trisolaran's uses espionage and soft power propaganda (literally videogames) to sway the brightest of minds of humanity to their side. Reminder, the book was written in the 2000's, when Chinese fears of a brain drain were real.
-
The biggest one: the Trisolaran's grand plan is to freeze technological progress on Earth. The US has been attempting to do the same to China by sanctioning semiconductors.
Like i don't really get what the author was going for how can China hide from the US?
This is kinda the open question the work is concerned with, and in the end the conclusion is that
HumanityChina can't? That the only conclusion to avoid open war and colonisation is technological parity?Actually pertinent leftist criticism of Dengism and China has been the amount (or lack thereof) of support for socialist causes/states
I feel like I'm the only person who thinks and says this, everybody else (including leftists) is obsessed with random shit like China cheating on their SATs or building trains or fake genocides.
I mean, the problem is that you can kinda trip and fall into US state department talking points if you're not careful, so I get why people don't do it in leftist spaces online.
Personally, I feel that since I can't influence Chinese policy one way or the other and that only the passage of time will reveal whether Socialism with Chinese Characteristics pans out or not, I should focus on what I can do locally rather than worry if China is actually communist or not.
That said, Xi please
I feel like I'm the only person who thinks and says this,
Fyi about 3 years ago, our minister for cracker control, Black Red Guard, also mentioned China's lack of material support to Nepal's recent Maoist revolution.
-
I mean I've listened to the audiobooks and I got to say if the Dark Forest is a metaphor for Chinese foreign policy than holy shit is it a bad one, the premise just absolutely swamps the supposed subtext to the point the author could only advance the plot thru contrivance and mangled subplots about magic WMDs
The premise itself is never actaully subverted or even examined in any serious way, by the half way point of the second book it's just completely taken at face value and as a result the narrative grinds to a halt, earth gets fucked in the end, the universe is collapsing and the constant timeskips destroys any hope of stakes or urgency in the plot
I just don't see anything analogous with the Dark Forest theory and modern Asian geopolitics
I just don't see anything analogous with the Dark Forest theory and modern Asian geopolitics
Avoiding open confrontation with a technologically superior opponent? (Again, the Three Body Problem was published in 2008. China's military capability has greatly grown since then.) Approach it from the defender's perspective: if there's a genocidal fascist colonist entity, do you risk broadcasting your location/global presence or is it wiser to do everything you can to avoid notice?
Are the books about the consequences of drawing the attention of that entity?
do you risk broadcasting your location/global presence or is it wiser to do everything you can to avoid notice
See this is where the metaphor just completely breaks down, how is China gonna avoid "broadcasting its location/global presence" what does that even mean in the context of geopolitics circa 2008?
This is what I mean when I say the premise swamps/overwhelms the subtext, the metaphor is 300 years out of date and historically incoherent
For the subtext of "avoiding open confrontation with a technologically superior opponent" to work, the premise and the books should've begun with a post-alien invasion storyline, something like Yakitori: Soldiers of Misfortune or Gintama, the remote spooky mysteriousness of the Dark Forest Theory acts too much like linear pathing in a video game, if you take the implications of the theory seriously there's only one way for the plot to go and it doesn't gel well with the subtext the author was trying to advance
what does that even mean in the context of geopolitics circa 2008?
It means Dengism. To quote Deng Xiaoping on Chinese foreign policy circa the 1980s: “observe calmly, secure our position, cope with affairs calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile, and never claim leadership.”
The metaphor's 40 years out of date, rather than 300.
if you take the implications of the theory seriously
I mean, in the context of Chinese national defense it means that technological parity is the only means of avoiding disaster, and the books are kinda about the disaster that happens if you attract the notice of a technologically superior opponent without achieving technological parity first
China is based but hiding there power level, duh.
I feel like it's worth mentioning that Obama was a big fan of this book series & I first heard about it on NPR of all places.
the premise just absolutely swamps the supposed subtext to the point the author could only advance the plot thru contrivance and mangled subplots about magic WMDs
I think this is just called science fiction haha
My impression of the genre is that most authors start with an interesting premise (especially when writing hard sci fi) and develop the story to explore it. From reading Ball Lightning and this trilogy, I don't think Liu Cixin is an exception -- like many sci fi authors, his background is in engineering, not literature.
I see the story as sci fi first and allegory second (to the extent a grand allegory, not just some echoes of the real world, was intended at all). My guess is this is how the author wrote it, too.
I love how Hexbears just make up their minds about what they think of the works they never even bothered to read lol. Never change.
I didn't make up my mind, I stated the impression I have of it based on what I've gleaned and stating my non-interest
writing three paragraphs criticizing the plot of a book you won't read
I must read all Harry Potter books before I can dunk on them for portraying slavery as totally cool
i mean yeah if you've never read the books it's pretty cringe to say stuff like that. you don't know how slavery is portrayed in the books, you havent read them.
I can criticize the books for that because I've read them and know how the main character is literally a slave owner, but for all you know I made that up.
You're right, fascism famously has nothing to do with the notion of a clash of civilizations wherein one must entirely subvert or eliminate the other as an inevitability of coexistence
You destroy anything that raises its head because you can't know whether or not it poses an existential threat.
Bit off topic, but there is something really fucked up about our universe that the cold hard laws of math dictate that the best possible course of action upon encountering other sentient life is to destroy it because it might destroy you first.
That is so depressing, can't wait for heat death to end this horrific nightmare permanently.
Don't worry, Dark Forest Theory is probably total bullshit since it just assumes alien civilizations will be monolithic in nature or coordinated enough to have a singular response to the presence of any rival civilization
But if it is true we're literally already dead since we've been blasting radio waves into the aether for over a century
The laws don't, it's all silly techbro bullshit.the kind of weapons, communications, and sensors "Dark Forest" requires are silly nonsense. It has an enormous number of holes. It's pretty easy to detect whether planets out to quite long distances have organic life on them, so why hasn't someone used their magic hyperspace lasers to blast every life baring planet, including us? If you want to destroy a solar system you've got to be at a level where you could shoot, idk, Jupiter, at another solar system. How are you going to do that? You'd pretty well have to turn an entire solar system in to a gun and people are going to notice if you re-configure a solar system to do that. If you build a dyson swarm and use it as a giant laser folks will notice the dimming of the star and everyone near the path of the beam will notice it and be aware of it's point of origin.
Dark Forest mostly drastically misunderstands how big space is, how stealth in space can and cannot work, how probability works, how rare life is, and makes a whole bunch of silly assumptions not least of which is that it's worth anyone's time to pretend that there are magic people in the sky who will punish us for being naughty.
I compare it to Pascal's Wager for illiterate tech bros. It's exactly as worthy of consideration as Roko's Basilisk.
I guess, but the sciencyness being so silly didn't work for me. Lovecraft style cosmic horror just straight up says "there are weird aliens who are totally bizarre and incomprehensible and they do psychic space magic for reasons your pathetic mammal brain will never understand and even a glancing encounter with them is so strange it will destroy your mind" and i can get behind that because it's fun silly.
This is just "hey, what if your neighbors were total assholes?"
Once the sophons show up there's no tension for the rest of the story bc it's just like "oh, the trisolarans have magic and can do anything they want no matter how little sense it makes." Like a big part of horror is gradually figuring out what the enemy is and realizing how totally fucked you are, but the sophons aren't possible and don't follow any physical rules so it's just like "welp, guess we're fucked then".
I always compare it to revelation space, another story that explores the Dark Forest idea.
spoiler
The Wolves in Revelation Space are real fucking weird, but you get deep, deep in to the story before you really even get the edges of what they are and what they're really capable of. The first book in the series is full of rapidly escalating "oh shit moments as the scale of how totally fucked everything is ratchets up again and again and again. The bad guys have a lot of space-magic that definitely does not agree with physics, but they're also up against fairly hard limits - lightspeed travel takes a long time, ftl is impossible, even the super-high tech alien spookies still need to respect conservation of energy. When they finally pull out their trump card it's the scale that is completely horrifying.
The second book is legit terrifying in so many ways. I don't even want to read it again. Third book is ok but nothing special. The ending was a bit meh for me but there is an ending at least.
I mean to be fair the last book ends with the literal death of the universe
Exactly. It's like if I watched Hamlet all the way through and then the French invade and slaughter all the survivors. Doesn't sound appealing.
The TenCent series does some things better, does some things worse. Netflix arguably had better character chemistry. Three Body Problem is a good story, but its message is a bad one, if humans encounter aliens and the first thing we do is not bring up communism than that’s unrealistic sci-fi.
By chemistry you mean everyone constantly saying "shut the fuck up" and elbowing or punching each other? It's just toxic.
I finished it but just barely, rolling my eyes the whole time. I guess it's supposed to be insightful about Chinese attitudes towards geopolitics if you finish the series, but the first book was dull and the interesting ideas were marred by being almost pure magic with barely a pretense of science to make them work.
The dark forest doesn't apply in real life, and as a thought experiment doesn't hold up either. I recently declared it to be another example of techbros re-inventing pascal's wager.
The dark forest doesn't apply in real life, and as a thought experiment doesn't hold up either.
This is a tad harsh -- we don't know what applies in real-life alien interactions, and it's as plausible as 100 things from other sci fi stories.
It's not a very good solution to the Fermi paradox. Most of its supporters have very fanciful beliefs about technology and it cleanly misses things like planets with organic life and high tech civilization being readily visible from enormous distances. If anyone nearby is looking they would have seen tell-tale chemicals in our atmosphere a very long time ago. Either there are no Dark Forest predators nearby, or there's already an RKV on it's way to Earth and we're boned.
And the solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma is Cooperate, not Betray. STEM nerds don't understand culture. Any kind of macroengineering weapon that a Dark Forest predator would need to do the Dark Forest would be visible from a great distance, as would the impact if they used it. We're talking about throwing brown dwarfs around, or using entire stars to build laser weapons. You can see things like that. If someone was doing it their neighbors would know, and then they'd be in a cold war. Presumably you can't just build and deploy a dyson swarm all at once, and you certainly can't just toss a Jupiterish sized object out of a solar system without someone noticing. Tiny RKVs are, idk, maybe possible but I think STEM types greatly, greatly underestimate the difficulties of throwing a guided projectile across hundreds or thousands of light years.
But to me the biggest obvious issue is; There's no stealth in space. You can't beat black body radiation, you probably can't conceal oxygen and methane in an atmosphere. You could maybe live in dark space if you got off your planet fast enough, adn that is a solution explored in the I think much better Dark Forest series Revelation Space.
And the Dark Forest people say there only need to be a few predators, but there also only need to be a few cooperators. Once a couple of cooperators take the risk and form an alliance the predators are now facing multiple species presumably with multiple ways of thinking and cooperating, they're potentially facing a dispersed defensive array that makes a clean alpha strike much less reliable. Because, again, the need for an absolutely clean, silent first strike can't be emphasized enough. You have to kill everyone in the enemy civ, instantly, at the same time or they'll back-track where your rock or laser came from and retaliate. If anyone survives all they have to do is build a bunch of voyager probes and send them to orbits around potentially inhabital stars with a message that says "We were murdered and these are the assholes who did it. Avenge us". That's basically what happens in the book.
On earth we all use nuclear subs as deterrence. Even if hte US did a full send on China or Russia, they'd still be able to use their subs to counter-attack and wipe us out in retaliation.
A lot of the responses to these criticisms just come down "Okay, but what if there was a wizard with an invisibility cloak and a wand that could silently blow up planets?" and then people have just started doing "god of the gaps". Like yeah, maybe htere are ascended beings with unimaginable technologies, but there's no evidence for that and it's not worth worrying about. You can't prepare for a true unknown unknown. You can't hide from an enemy with unknowable perceptive abilities.
And then the other side of that is that if there really are transcendental intelligences floating we can't predict or imagine what their priorities or goals are. "The Dark Forest" was dreamed up by planet bound social primates who live for about 100 years. It makes sense to us, but it probably not to other modes of existence. Trying to Dark Forest snipe an self-replicating Von Neumann swarm would be tricky to say the least, since if you missed even one theoretical self-replicating bot it could re-colonize the galaxy in, as people love to say, five million years. It'd be much less of a problem for people living in the deep black if that's even possible.
And then there's a lot of assumptions that are being made by 21st century Americans; They look up and they see a frontier, free land to be conquered, settled, exploited, then used as a staging point for further conquests. A lot of them don't grasp either how expensive that is and how there's no return at all. Like there's just no point to it. There's really nothing out there. If you just use birth control to achieve a steady population there's enough resources in this solar system to last for an extremely, extremely long time. Like "front row seat to the Milky Way/Andromeda collision" long time. And what do you get if you spend decades or centuries or millenia coasting through the deep black, and your ship survives the journey? The same hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, maybe iron, gold, or even uranium if you're really lucky, that you can find anywhere else in the galaxy in unbelievable amounts.
Idk. There's just so many problems, and so much of it relies on hand waves or imaginary technologies or outright magic, and it's such a reflection of the culture and mindset of this moment, and it doesn't line up with the observable universe. People love to point out that Von Neumann probes could colonize the entire galaxy in a few million years. We haven't observed any evidence of megastructures anywhere to day. There's no evidence anyone has visited our system recently.
My solution to the Fermi Paradox is much simpler; There isn't any reason to travel interstellar space. It's really expensive, it's really boring, it's really dangerous, and there's really nothing to gain from doing it. I assume most people just stay home and develop a sustainable economy, maybe shift to another system if sometime goes wrong with their star. We assume infinite exponential expansion is the norm because Europeans and Americans are primed to think that way and everyone else expects there to be someone like us out there.
But then look back and the historical problems with settler colonialism - The time needed to cross the atlantic and pacific caused huge problems with command and control. If it hadn't been just a few months or weeks of travel time lots of colonies would have defected from their parent nations. Some did. There were rebellions, wars. Look at America; We did expand, did wipe out less militarily capable civs, and then turned on our progenitors, defeated them, and eventually conquered them. If you send out colonies you'd want to have very tight control over them because once they're 10 lights away you have the same Dark Forest problem with them that you do with every other community in space. They could turn on you at any time and you'd never know. They could broadcast your location to the Dark Forest predators. It's just as likely that there aren't a bunch of probes in the Sol system because that kind of colonial expansion is just too inherently unstable and can't be sustained across large swathes of hte galaxy - Everyone fights their own civ, or gets bored and stops expanding, or whatever.
And maybe people just "transcend to a higher plane of existence". If digitized consciousness gets solved a civ doesn't really need much space, they can just hollow out a moon or something and build whatever the closest feasible thing is to a matrioshka brain and chill there. It really doesn't take much mass or electricity to run a consciousness.
There's also the competing Bright Forest idea, that space is full of civs chilling in dark space or in the atmosphere of gas giants or whatever, waiting for enough people to wake up and turn the lights on to make it practical to meet their neighbors and say high. Or maybe they're all just up their shitposting at each other using tight-beam lasers or gravity waves or something we can't detect, and we just don't know how to see them yetl.
There's also Dawn War peacekeepers concept; The Dark Forest period already happened, and it caused a huge miserable war, and the survivors decided that sucked so instead of wiping all the younger civs out they're shepherding things to keep us from killing ourselves and each other. We don't see anyone else because when people start building solar battleships and brown dwarf guns and dyson swarm lasers the elder civs show up and tell them to knock it off and stop being jerks. Basically; People much, much older than us solved the Dark Forest problem in the past and that's why we don't see planets blowing up and stars going in to early nova all over the place.
Hell, maybe they've got ecological conservation laws and you get fined for littering and that's why there's no von neumann probes cluttering up the place.
People always talk about paperclip maximizers as another E-risk, and my answer to that is another really simple one; Anything flexible and adaptable enough to be a paperclip maximizer might just decide it doesn't wnat to be. A lot of us already believe that an interplanetary, let alone interstellar, civ isn't possible under capitalism, and infinite unsustainable growth is very much a capitalism thing.
Idk, Dark Forest has so many problems, and it's so misanthropic and negative nihilistic, and paints such an utterly cold, miserable portrait of our future, 1.) I don't think it's really worth taking seriously do to all the gaps, and 2.) even if it's 100% right I'd rather get RKV'd by a dark forest predator than spend the next 30 trillion years hiding in a hole waiting for someone with vastly superior perceptive capabilities to find us with instruments we can't conceive of and blow us up anyway.
Oh, one last thing; The Von Neumann probe guys never seem to consider the problem of evolution. You can't beat entropy, errors are going to creep in to any self replicating system over a long enough period fo time. Maybe you can make magical perfect error correction, but I doubt it, and even if you do your probes need to be very intelligent and adaptable to deal with all the problems and unexpected challenges they're going to encounter surfing from world to word. Maybe you can build an interstel
i don't want to assume you have checked out the atomic rockets website but i perked up as soon as you started talking about no stealth in space
Any kind of macroengineering weapon that a Dark Forest predator would need to do the Dark Forest would be visible from a great distance
my favorite theory for the big filter aliens/ dark forest with predators - there is only one surviving ancient civilization - and they are spread out all over the galaxy eliminating nascent civilizations with directed jets of nearby supernovas. I mean theres a supernova waiting to happen at a star ~ 7500 light years away and the axis is aimed directly at us.
then again it could be pure coincidence.
But Civilizations tend to not go to war with an enemy they cant see or reach.
i read it a few years back and it was entertaining and easy to read but afterward i reflected on it and was ultimately kinda underwhelmed for similar reasons as Frank
They did screw up Ye Wenjie’s characterization in the Netflix version though, who was a far more complex character in the book and the Tencent series.
spoiler for Books 1 and 2
In the Netflix version, old Ye Wenjie still seemed to hold a grudge against humanity, and only began to turn when she realized the San Ti Ren had betrayed the organization. This is a very poor interpretation of old Ye Wenjie, who by that time had already given up on humanity long ago. “Her heart was already dead.” She already had her revenge the moment she pressed the button, decades earlier. That’s why old Ye Wenjie dropped a clue to Luo Ji, just in case that if humanity still had something in them to be salvaged.
If you understand Chinese, then the Tencent’s Anniversary cut (from 30 episodes down to 26) is already out, which removed a lot of the superfluous and repetitive stuff. It’s still long but the pacing is slightly better (I haven’t finished it yet, considering it was dropped just a day before the Netflix version came out lol). Otherwise, wait for the English subtitles.
The Cultural Revolution scenes were filmed but eventually cut by the censorship, and unlikely to see the light of day anytime soon.
I've seen 15 episodes of the Tencent version and Wang Miao is just starting to figure out the VR/AR game. I stopped watching due to how horribly paced it was. I've read the books, and much preferred Netflix's adaptation.
I think you're probably just too used to Anglo slop media where explosion go boom every three seconds.
Wasn'tt hat whole sequance like 2-3 chapters in the book? I can't imaginestretching it out for fifteen hours, it only took me a day to read the book.
I actually appreciate stories taking time to build up tension and mystery... Sorry. Slow burners good.
I love a slow burn but 3BP (the book) isn't a slow burn. Would be odd to make a TV show version that is.
I was hoping that Netflix would do faster pacing (have only sent the tencent version) but you know, they could always do the opposite type of bad pacing as OP alleges lol.
I thought it was solid. I agree with some of the criticisms about the acting and lack of mystery/intrigue, but you can blame the book for that. I think the characters had to be split up because IIRC there is a lot of internal thinking and strategy that happens in the book that works better as dialogue in a TV show. Overall, the more interesting ideas and scenes come the further off the rails the trilogy goes, so I'm glad they got through a lot of the early wallfacer stuff in this first season.
But we need to boost this series though, otherwise we will never see a rendition of the far future where every man on earth is a femboy.
There was really a bunch of weird stuff in Death's End about how this or that era could "produce real men" or not. Hard times and soft times cycle level stuff.
Ikr lmao the justification for it is evidence they allow reddit in china: "bro just trust me, the more advanced soyciety becomes, the more effeminate the men get due to a lack of necessity for manual labor, just trust me bro..."
I mean I wouldnt mind living in a time where all the men wore makeup and dressed all cute, boggles one's mind how the author tried to make this out to be a bad thing lol
I can't believe Liu Cixin is a gender accelerationist...
There was also some huge issues on the dark forest too. Like the wallfacer guy just be a huge weeb who wants the perfect waifu, that was so fucking weird
My opinion on the hole trilogy has always been that conceptually the books are 10/10 amazing but in terms of execution it could be a lot better.
monkey's paw curls
The Daily Wire adapts it and quadruples down on the misogyny.
I don’t understand how they could fuck it up so badly.
I was willing to give the show creators a chance and even had a lot of expectations from them because the first few seasons of GoT were great, but here it’s like they don’t understand the source materials and don’t know how to tell a good story at all (no tension, no buildups). The “Who has a better story than Bran” meme sounds so fitting now that I’ve seen what they have done to the TBP.
It easily could be. The other problem is that it's so obviously a product of focus groups of soccer moms and lib millennials. They try so hard to make things with something for everybody, e.g. comedy, romance, action, thriller, scifi, fantasy all mashed into ONE film/show and it's just a fucking mess. STOP trying to please everyone. Not every film/show has to be watched by three billion people.
it's extremely funny because one piece LA was their most watched show for awhile (may still be) and it straight up said haha eff you this is anime rubberman bullshit all the way down - and that's what brought in people who'd never consider watching a 1k episode anime (myself included). these studios will never learn that genuine love for the source material and an earnest attempt to do it justice draws in so many more eyes than cheap, patronizing pandering that barely conceals the studio's contempt for their audience.
Its like they asked how they could make this Chinese story as anti China as possible.
I'm really loving the three body problem but I'm completely unfamiliar with the original novels. The show at least got me greatly interested in the premise. Was going to read the novels anyway but this post might convince me to pick them up sooner rather than later.
The books are great, though expect some brainworms from a boomer Chinese nationalist. Otherwise I always tell people that if you want to understand how Chinese people think about the world (generalizing here of course), read the TBP series.
There have been so many times throughout the books that the author totally nailed how the Chinese society would typically respond to foreign threats or global events, and I just had to nod my head along and said, “yes, it truly is a very Chinese story”, though this layer of meaning would certainly be missed by the vast majority of Western readers.
Very relevant to the current US-China relationship as well. It worries me that Obama liked the books - if he truly understands China and how naive it could be, then we’re screwed.
how Chinese people think about the world
Is total utter nihilism and misanthropy that common?
Which characters were nihilistic and misanthropic? Luo Ji was probably the one arguably to be borderline nihilistic (which made him a great Wallfacer), but most of the characters were naive and optimistic to a fault.
Then theres Cheng Xin whos stupid choices makes her one of the most hateable fictional characters in arguably all of sci-fi history.
You’re missing the point. Hated as she was, it doesn’t change the fact that she represented the face of Humanity. The book literally made the point that Humanity would not have chosen Wade, even though his iron-fisted approach could have saved Humanity. They chose Cheng Xin because she embodied the core values of Humanity, even if it meant great sacrifices and regrets (the people only hated Cheng Xin after they themselves had elected her, but even then, that hatred did not last long).
The point is that even under such harsh and hostile environment as the Dark Forest state, Humanity (i.e. China) will always choose compassion over atrocity, cooperation over conquest, and kindness over hatred.
This has been the case for China for a long time. Two to three generations after the Imperial Japanese invasion, the young people have all but forgotten the atrocities of Japan and now loving Japanese culture and their animes and their video games. Same thing for American culture (until very recently with Trump and then Biden), even though America never stopped seeing China as an adversary.
This is our cultural trait, and you cannot change that.
the young people have all but forgotten the atrocities of Japan and now loving Japanese culture and their animes and their video games.
Yeah that is really something amazing. Why would a demographic embrace the cultural artefacts of a nation that, to this day, has never apologized for its atrocities against their grandparents? Not even being sarcastic here, guess it really shows how much China bounced back from WW2 due to the CPC's guidance.
It probably helps that almost the entire generation that committed or suffered under these atrocities has been dead for a while
Living memory is so much more potent than history
Because nations aren't people, they're not monolithic, they're barely even real. Afaik the idea of ancient, durable enmity between nations rarely if ever happens unless they're constantly at war, and even then it breaks down as soon as people start talking to each other.
Warfare and international violence are games played by capitalists and kings. Normal people mostly don't identify the world that way, and the second they start to actually interact with each other the walls start breaking down. An excellent example would be the US invasion of Grenada. Afaik the very explicit danger Grenada represented to the US was an English speaking communism that could talk to Americans directly.
Defection and fraternization, basically learning, tolerance, and acceptance, have always been critical threats to imperial and colonial projects. The kind of blind hatred and ignorance required to keep up colonial and imperial relations usually has to be enforced by the state.
Luo Ji is such a badass character. How could you not be a fucking mess with everything he was put through and the weight on him, but he kept on keeping on.
The author. He seems to think that the only direction for humanity is inevitable self annihilation. The story is just relentlessly misanthropic. Sci fi is always about contemporary life one way or another, and he portrays the only outcome of Terran politics as pathetic and inevitbale self destruction, or something. Idk, i'm having a hard time mapping it on to real geopolitics and the more people talk about it the more it seems like it's just a silly old misanthrope ranting and less like any kind of cogent analysis of geopolitics.
Just gonna quote myself here
it's a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the
TrisolaransAmerican Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel)As far as I can tell China's foreign policy towards America since Deng has been purchasing rope from the capitalists while keeping a completely straight face and it's starting to pay off
As I understand it, this is the plot of the books too, with humanity reverse-engineering Trisolaran technology and building a stockpile of weapons to ensure Mutually Assured Destruction.
It all turns out to be utterly pointless and everyone dies miserably having achieved nothing, since the author apparently doesn't understand how MAD, nuclear deterennce, and second-strike weapons work. The deterrence in tbp fails because the retaliation system has a single point of failure with no second strike ability. The entirety of modern nuclear deterrence is designed around making sure that the situation that happens in tbp doesn't happen.
Or maybe the author contrived a scenario to explore what would happen if MAD thinking failed? As a cautionary tale on an over-reliance of that strategy in the face of a technologically superior opponent?
I dunno just spitballing here haven't finished book 2.
In the books the deterrence (broadcasting our location so some powerful alien civilization will blow us both up) does have second strike capability though.
book spoiler
One of the ships that fled the doomsday battle ultimately uses its radio to send the MAD broadcast, leading to the Trisolarans fleeing Earth and a third civilization sending a magic superweapon at the solar system.
(literal) spoilers
The last scene in the Tencent series is literally motivational music playing over the cop character getting two other characters to quit drinking themselves to death and railing against hopelessness in the face of insurmountable odds.
I wouldnt equate Cixins views as Chinese or Communist beliefs, hes kind of out there with some Malthusian ideas and his stories have some misogyny within them. We wouldnt call Frank Herbert a leftist because he did acid at some sand dunes and had a better understanding of the Middle East than most westerners. Three Body Problem is same deal, we must recognize its not an inherently leftist story. Arguably anything that is not utopian sci-fi is not truly leftist.
The books are great, though expect some brainworms from a boomer Chinese nationalist.
I got pretty miffed that the book would do our boy Norman Bethune like that.
I understand the cultural implications of referring to that westerner who is a Doctor "Bethune" but Norman Bethune was a heroic, kind, and extremely generous man who risked his life—ultimately to lose it—in the efforts to provide healthcare to the people who desperately needed it, first on the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War and later in Mao's China.
They did him dirty by associating him with a crackpot.
In Memory of Norman Bethune by Mao (6:28)
Show
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I don't like the actress they have for Wang Miao and I don't like what they did to my boy Da Shi, but the show has the budget to actually pull off some of the crazy sci-fi fantasy bullshit depicted in the books. The Panama scene was cool. The sophon unfolding was cool. Eventually Netflix is gonna have to spend a squillion dollars trying to depict the dual-vector foil and that's gonna be sick.
I am enjoying the show while nitpicking about all the details. Like all your criticisms ring true to me, but also last night I got to see a much cooler version of that one scene from Ghost Ship and I know the weird sci-fi stuff only gets better.
