The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)
For the first time this year, unlikely the last, I’ve shelved the previous read and moved on.
It was almost three weeks ago when I picked up The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, an alternative history novel set against the context of a pandemic that wiped out a huge piece of the European population five hundred years ago.
I have not real excuse besides it was a bit of a slog.
Grand ideas, complex characters, and a twisting narrative across multiple story-lines spanning time, space and the afterlife… meet my short attention span, I guess.
I always feel a little bad when nearly two hundred pages into a novel I pick it up, sigh, and then read. Analogously, it feels like walking down a beach, looking for a trail in the sand, while the waves wash away the footprints, while knowing that if you could just find a hint of some other traveller it would lead you to a treasure… or at least a good seafood restaurant.
It also makes me feel a bit numb because set against the backdrop of our own global pandemic, I’m mentally drained and I know if I had less anxiety about the universe I could probably find that trail in the sand and I might actually enjoy The Years of Rice and Salt.
So, perhaps saying I’m shelving it is a little extreme. I’m going to leave it on my table beside my comfy reading chair, and if I feel particularly focussed some day I’ll dig into it again (and check in here if I ever finish it.)
Instead, I pulled the second book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin, a sequel to The Three Body Problem which I finished just over a month ago.
As I dive back into this story of a slow motion alien invasion of Earth, the plot has jumped ahead by a few years as humanity spins up a variety of reactions to the event.
A recap (and spoilers) in the first novel a civilization from a planet from a nearby star system is revealed to be in a bit of a pickle as their triple-sun solar system creates chaotic and cyclically destructive environs for their continued survival. It turns out that some rogue humans replied to some space spam and now the aliens know we exist and are coming to take the planet away… but in four hundred years because even a few light years is a hulluva long way to go. As an advance invasion they’ve sent ahead things called sophons which are advanced computers curled up inside the higher dimensions of elementary particles. The sophons are extremely tiny, but are able to disrupt humanity’s ability to progress technologically by ruining advanced physics experiments that would give us technology capable of defending ourselves four hundred years onward. Also they allow the aliens to snoop on our communications, so … no secrets for us. What’s a species to do!
I guess that’s what I’ll find out in part two of this trilogy.
Hopefully the characters have a longer attention span than I do.