Just finished reading Cixin’s “The Dark Forest”, the sequel to “Three Body Problem”… I desperately need to discuss it since no one else in my life has read it
I read the entirety of the Doomsday Battle massacre while next to my partner on a flight back home after our vacation to Florida, and I was quite literally white-knuckle gripping my armrest and partner’s hand while gasping and jaw-dropped.
While I would say Cixin doesn’t excel with character building or development, his brilliance lies in the magnificent theoretical and philosophical world-building of this series. Instead of growing attached to specific characters (except for Da Shi - I’m admittedly quite fond of him), I essentially became attached to humanity as a whole through this species-driven, global patriotism and its challenges with the transition from the Golden Age through the Great Ravine to the naive optimism in victory pre-Doomsday Battle.
I’ve never been one to feel strongly about a collective cause in an imminent war like the brewing one with the Trisolarans, and yet there I was, silently sobbing on this flight reading how the entire space fleet was annihilated in the span of sheer minutes. And then, the final stab in the heart of watching the surviving fleet ships succumbing to the Dark Forest theory by annihilating each other in a self-cannibalism of resources.
It’s a day later, and all I can still see in my mind’s eye is this crystal-clear mental image of the perfectly-reflective droplet speeding through space, obliterating ship after ship in the span of seconds in a trail of successive fusion explosions.
So all this is to say… damn I can’t wait to read the third book in the series. It’s by far one of the most brilliant pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.