u/Putrid_Cycle595

so after my last post about tylers plan being rewritten a bunch of people asked for more details on what else was changed. went down the rabbit hole and found out liu cixin posted about this himself on a chinese academic forum called shuimu bbs back in april 2015 right when the english dark forest came out. the numbers are insane. over 1000 changes to the text. not typos or grammar. actual content edits driven by the tor books editor. some of it was the ball lightning removal we already talked about but theres way more. the editor flagged descriptions of a female un secretary general as beautiful and had it removed. she questioned why all four wallfacers are male. words like pure and angelic when describing women were systematically replaced. liu cixin said he understood some changes were cultural adaptation but heres what gets me. he actually wrote 10000 extra characters of supplementary material trying to preserve the original tyler storyline without needing ball lightning knowledge. the publisher didnt use any of it. just rewrote the whole thing from scratch. theres also the chapter order thing in book 1. ken liu moved the cultural revolution chapters from the middle to the beginning. but that one liu cixin actually loved because the original chapter order was forced by chinese publishing censorship not his choice. so the english version of book 1 is actually closer to his original vision than the chinese version. wild right. two different kinds of censorship shaping the same trilogy in opposite directions. chinese censorship moved chapters around. american editorial intervention rewrote character storylines. theres a detailed breakdown of all of this including liu cixins own quotes at Liu Cixin Reveals: The Dark Forest English Edition Had Over 1,000 Changes and the specific tyler rewrite comparison at Tyler's Wallfacer Plan Was Completely Rewritten for anyone who wants to go deeper.

so i just found out that the tyler you read about in the english dark forest is literally a different character than the one in the chinese original. not like minor dialogue changes. his entire wallfacer plan is a completely different story.

in the chinese version tylers plan is based on ball lightning (liu cixins standalone prequel novel). he wants to use macro-atom weapons to quantize earths entire fleet into quantum ghosts. his real strategy that the wallbreaker reveals is that he planned to attack earths own fleet with ball lightning, kill everyone, and then send their quantum ghost army to fight the trisolarans. his logic being that a fleet thats already been destroyed cant be destroyed again. when he breaks down at the end he literally screams i want to use ball lightning to destroy earths fleet i want to turn them into quantum ghosts.

but in the english version all of that is gone. instead he has some plan about a mosquito fleet delivering ice to the trisolaran fleet as a gift and then doing a kamikaze attack. no ball lightning, no quantum ghosts, no attacking your own military. completely different plan with completely different moral implications. apparently this happened because ball lightning hadnt been translated into english yet when dark forest came out in 2015 so the publisher just rewrote the whole thing. liu cixin even wrote 10000 extra characters trying to explain tylers plan without needing ball lightning but the publisher didnt use any of it.

theres a really detailed side by side comparison of both versions at: The Biggest Translation Change in Three-Body Problem: Tyler's Wallfacer Plan Was Completely Rewritten . It goes through exactly what was changed and why. honestly kind of wild that most english readers have no idea theyre reading a fundamentally different version of this character.

read all three body books and then immediately went through dune 1-4 and i think my brain is permanently rewired. the thing that gets me is how these two series are both absolute masterpieces but they couldnt be more different. dune made me fall in love with characters. paul is one of the most tragic protagonists in all of fiction. the way herbert writes about power corrupting idealism is so personal you feel it in your gut. three body made me fall in love with ideas. i dont even remember what luo ji looks like but i will never forget the dark forest theory. the droplet scene, the dimensional strike, the singer just casually wiping out star systems. liu cixin doesnt write people he writes civilizations and somehow thats even more devastating. the funniest part is three body has objectively worse characters than dune and dune has objectively less interesting science than three body and they both still rate 10/10 because theyre playing completely different games. dune is about humans pretending to be gods. three body is about the universe showing humans they dont matter. i wrote a deeper breakdown of the comparison here https://3body.wiki/en/blog/three-body-vs-dune covering worldbuilding, characters, science, philosophy and adaptations. which series hit you harder?

just finished ball lightning (the standalone liu cixin novel from 2005) and im kind of upset nobody told me to read it before three body. the whole time i was reading dark forest i thought tylers ghost fleet plan came out of nowhere. turns out its literally the plot of an entire previous novel. the ball lightning weapon that can selectively destroy matter, the quantum superposition of macro objects, lin yun getting quantized... tyler just took all of that and tried to scale it up to fleet size. but honestly the best part of ball lightning isnt the science or the weapons. its the love story. dr chen spending years leaving roses for lin yuns quantum ghost, knowing that when hes not looking she picks them up and they disappear into superposition with her. its the most romantic thing liu cixin ever wrote which is wild because this is the guy who wrote the dimensional strike scene. if youre interested i found a really good breakdown of all the connections between ball lightning and three body here https://3body.wiki/en/blog/ball-lightning-connection that goes through every thread that connects the two books. highly recommend reading ball lightning before a reread of three body. you see everything differently.

been rereading dark forest lately and the thing that keeps hitting me is how much of a long con zhang beihai runs. like for most of the book hes pretending to be the perfect loyal officer with an unshakeable belief in humanity winning. he tells everyone he believes we can beat the trisolarans. hes picked specifically because hes the guy most likely to keep morale up. meanwhile hes quietly engineering an escape plan for humanity. when he finally hijacks the natural selection its not a betrayal its the reveal of what hes been doing the entire time. i feel like hes the secret fifth wallfacer in a way. the other four got resources and public power. zhang beihai got no resources and had to fake his entire public identity. but of all the plans he was the only one who actually understood what was at stake. luo ji made the deterrence work. but zhang beihai literally saved the last remnants of humanity. without him there is no blue space and no gravity and no eventual escape from the dimensional strike. and yet when people talk about heroes of the trilogy its always luo ji or da shi or wade. zhang beihai barely gets brought up. am i alone on this?

FYI from 3body.wiki:

- Zhang Beihai: Three-Body's Fifth Wallfacer

- Zhang Beihai: The True Hero of the Three-Body Trilogy

just finished deaths end and i cant stop thinking about the scene where the solar system gets hit by the dual vector foil. like i knew it was coming because people kept referencing it but nothing prepares you for actually reading it. the way liu cixin describes jupiter getting flattened into this massive painting, and then the sun, and then earth... and the crew on the ship watching their entire civilization become a 2D image behind them while trying to reach escape velocity. what gets me is that the singer civilization didnt even think twice about it. it was pest control to them. they literally picked the cheapest weapon available. thats what makes it so much worse than the droplet scene imo. the droplet was terrifying because of the power gap but at least the trisolarans considered humanity a threat. the singer just... didnt care. anyone else feel like this scene hits harder than the droplet attack? the droplet felt like a battle, the dimensional strike felt like getting stepped on by someone who didnt even notice you were there.