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.
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:
This was how it was translated into English:
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.
Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?
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.
The Trisolarians are Japanese in the sense that they are most relatable to a Chinese audience given its historical context, but the first book was written in the early 2000s, in the wake of the worst US-China relations that followed the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Yugoslavia and the 2001 Hainan Island incident, which nearly sparked a war between both countries (people old enough will remember how close we were at war back then, not to mention that China was far weaker than it is today) only to be averted by 9/11 attack later that year, as the US shifted its attention away from China to the Middle East for the next decade, followed by the 2009 financial crisis and spared China from immediate threat for almost 20 years.
So, yes, Trisolarians can be seen as a metaphor that combines former (Japan) and current oppressors (America), although many references about the Trisolarians in the books hinted strongly at Imperial Japan. It’s fiction at the end of the day and I don’t know why people are trying so hard to see a 1:1 reference to the real world, rather than extracting the meanings and exploring the questions the story itself provokes in relation to the real world.
Books 2 and 3 went further into the Earth-Trisolaris conflict but the point I want to make is that even though the author has his own predilection (and it shows in the novel, and ones that I don’t necessarily agree with), the reason why the books are so great is that it prompts questions that provokes further, deeper thoughts, rather than just the author unloading on you his own beliefs and ideology.
I won’t spoil Book 3 here, but there is a huge plotline in that book that goes into decoding and extracting meanings from what appears to be just a typical story. The author literally hinted that there are deeper layers of meaning to be decoded in all 3 of his books.
I guess there are people who read the novels and just want to be handed the messages at face value, and people who read the novels but also try to contemplate and explore the deeper meanings especially in contemporary context.
Yeah, I had vague recollections about this, along with Deng's foreign policy which is what I based my reading of the book on.
Yeah, in this thread I was trying to simplify and make the analogies as obvious as possible but what you said is true, we should be focusing on the questions the books provoke.
Sounds about right tbh
Its really amazing how Liu can accomplish conveying such thought provoking, heavy themes, while at the same time making his novels addictive to read.