The Dark Forest

By: Cixin Liu, Joel Martinsen - translator

Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan

Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Soon to be a Netflix original series!

"Wildly imaginative." (President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy)

This near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking listeners to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from Cixin Liu, China's most beloved science fiction author.

In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion - in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike.

Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy

The Three-Body Problem

The Dark Forest

Death's End

Other books

Ball Lightning

Supernova Era

To Hold Up the Sky (forthcoming)

©2008 Cixin Liu (P)2015 Macmillan Audio

A New Favorite

Where does Dark Forest rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The title of my review says it. If you enjoyed The Three Body Problem, you'll enjoy this too. There are good reasons why many science fiction fans around the world find Cixin Liu so noteworthy.

What did you like best about this story?

He writes highly distinctive and original space opera, on a grand scale and in an entirely modern way. And he does it while investing his fully-imagined characters with specific and very interesting complexities.
The society-building, world-building and alien-building here are equally outstanding. And if you like interesting science with your science fiction- it is offered in abundance.
Too many books these days are thinly-disguised clones of some other writer's original success. I'm so bored with copies of copies.
But that makes it exhilarating to encounter a new modern master of this genre, who tells his own tale on his own creative terms.

Which scene was your favorite?

If a book is interesting enough in a sustained way, as this one is, there will be no such thing as a single favorite scene. This is not a question asked of a great whole. Also, this question solicits spoilers.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Far from it. This is a highly complex story which requires and deserves time and attention- not fast food.

Any additional comments?

Some may also like that there are a few common contemporary features absent in this trilogy so far.
The author doesn't feel a pressing literary need to add explicit sex, endless cursing, or gratuitous space battles to the clever unfolding of good ideas.
I haven't finished this book yet, and even if I had, I wouldn't describe more of the story itself here. Of all things book-review related, I dislike spoilers the most.
One can discover enough about the general story outline just from the publisher's description. I read reviews for some sense of what reviewers think makes a particular book worth buying.
So I am just here to try to say why I am enjoying this trilogy so thoroughly, and to lend support to a first-rate writer who is new to me.

The narrator this time is not Luke Daniels. When I saw that change I almost didn't buy the audiobook. I'm fed up with poor narrators, and will happily read a book rather than suffer.
The short audio sample only told me that P.J. Ochlan wasn't bad. I couldn't really tell how I would find his narration after a while. But I took a chance, and found I liked him just fine.
There is plenty to appreciate in the non-intrusive reading he gives here. He didn't stumble over words (even the Chinese), kept to a good flowing cadence, and has a very pleasant voice.
He reads intelligently, with full comprehension of what he is reading- and that alone has a high value. So I have no complaints. I will deduct one star simply because he happens not to be Luke Daniels.
In listening, you might at first find the sounds of the Chinese names and places a bit difficult to remember. You could write them down, but I learned them the easy way.
Just by paying attention and letting the story flow through me, it wasn't long before my mind remembered most of the characters and places by itself.


To sum it up: there is an exceptionally thoughtful and original story here, wrapped up and well presented in equally fine writing.

Epic space opera heavy on ideas and characters

A Big Ideas book that harkens back to authors like Niven, Pournelle, or Asimov, who created grand galaxy-spanning plots governed by hard science. Cixin Liu pays more attention to the people who inhabit his universe, though. Even though The Dark Forest spans centuries and involves a conflict between two civilizations that will literally engulf stars, the main characters are actually people, not the physics and technology.

That said, I was quite conscious throughout the reading of this book that it was translated from Chinese. The style, the way in which people are described, in terms of infinitely nuanced facial expressions, emotions conveyed through mediums not often emphasized in the Western literary tradition, was different, as was the pacing and dialog. Cixin Liu is obviously a aficionado of Western science fiction (there are numerous call-outs to Western literature in the book), yet this novel had a different "flavor" in the same way that I've noticed Russian science fiction and fantasy novels (of which I've read a few) are also recognizably distinct in character.

The Dark Forest is a sequel to the Hugo-winning The Three-Body Problem. That book ended with the Trisolaran invasion fleet heading to Earth from four light years away. Since their fleet is traveling at sub-light speed, that gives Earth several centuries to prepare. Plenty of time, right? Except that defense plans are complicated by the fact that thanks to quantum trickery, Earth is already monitored by omnipresent "sophons" that give the Trisolarans instant real-time intelligence on everything Earthlings do.

The one advantage humans have is that Trisolaran thoughts are transparent to one another, and thus they have a poor understanding of deception or hiding one's intentions. To them, to communicate is by definition to openly reveal all one's plans.

To prepare a defense that the Trisolarans can't anticipate, the UN institutes the "Wallfacer" project, in which four men are appointed to become Wallfacers. Given almost unlimited resources and authority, their jobs are to independently conceive and execute a plan to defend Earth without telling anyone what they're up to.

The Wallfacer storylines are strange but interesting, requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief even if the physics behind their schemes seems somewhat plausible. They develop grand plans to launch super-megaton stellar hydrogen bombs or robot space fleets, each of which is eventually revealed to be a devious scheme within a scheme, all of them extraordinarily unlikely and yet believable. Opposing the Wallfacers are human collaborators, who create a "Wallbreaker" assigned to oppose each Wallfacer.

The primary protagonist of the book, Luo Ji, is a lazy, greedy, gambler and failed academic who, quite to his own shock and dismay, is made one of the Wallfacers. Naturally, he becomes the Wallfacer upon whom the survival of the human race will ultimately depend.

There are lots of recurring themes in The Dark Forest that only occurred to me later in the book, and more that will probably occur to me as I think about it some more. The way in which the very act of communicating can be a threat, for example, is revealed in the climax of the novel, where the title is also explained, and then you will realize how cleverly the author foreshadowed this in the first book.

The Dark Forest is an alien invasion story, a space opera with epic spaceship battles, a far future scientific romance, and here and there a bit of modern political allegory. I enjoyed it more than the first book, and I quite liked the first book. This is the second of a trilogy, and given how this volume ends, I am really not sure what to expect in the third book. But I'll be reading it soon.

Great themes and ideas for a future history

Any additional comments?

What an interesting book, full of very well thought out ideas. I love books that make me question the universe and what I know about it, this book does that and leaves me wondering about the various themes it proposes. That's not to say that it's a perfect book, there are problems, but we'll get into that in a minute.

The plot is pretty good. It takes up where the last book lets off. The earth is doomed. The inhabitants of Tri-Solaris have decided that they are going to move in due to the danger their world is in due to the Three-Body Problem that their stars have created. They see it as their only way to survive. They also think that we're just in the way. Using their superior technology, the can monitor every thing we do, there are no secrets from them. They have also blocked our future technological progress, so that we can't advance beyond their ability to destroy us. So, what are we left to do? How do we face this threat.

I think Liu Cixin has done a great job answering those questions. His understanding of political, sociological, and physical science is pretty darn good. He uses that knowledge to great effect, describing how society would handle this over a long period of time. I did think there were a few times where the plot bogged down a bit and I thought about fast forwarding, but I was worried I'd miss something important, so I didn't.

Where he runs into trouble, in my opinion, and it's a minor issue, since it's common with these types of "hard" science fiction books, is with the individual characters. Only a handful of characters gets a true personality. The rest of the characters serve the story and interact with the those few characters who are important. Worse, the female characters are only there to push the main character on. The only life they have is what the main character needs them to have and then they disappear.

That being said, that is a common problem for this genre. I'm not saying that it shouldn't change, just that it's, unfortunately, common.

Anyway, I did enjoy the book for it's themes. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series to see how he picks things up and the direction he takes things.

The middle of an amazing ride.

(This is the same review as for "Death's End," the last book in this Trilogy)

This trilogy is mind-bending. The concepts discussed and distance covered are huge. The events are impossible to predict, and sometimes hard to understand. All of the ideas presented are at least somewhat based in actual science (mostly physics). So I guess that makes it "true" science fiction.

Again, I cannot over-emphasize the scope of this book--in terms of time and in terms of space. An amazing ride.

There are some things to nit-pick: Sometimes "the world" or more precisely "the population" seems to learn of events and decisions in an incredibly short time, and some decisions made by those in charge feel a bit forced or simplistic. A larger issue is the treatment of "masculine" and "feminine" traits. These traits are described as if they are set in stone (I got the feeling that at times that the sentence I just read may as well have started with "All women think..." or "All men think...")

While I just spent more time talking about the nits than the stuff I liked, these negatives were not enough to turn this into a book (sorry, trilogy) that I won't recommend. I do recommend it--wholeheartedly.

P.J. Ochlan does a fantastic job of narration, slightly changing his voice (sometimes more than slightly) for each of the myriad characters.

Love this series!

Honestly, I struggled a lot to finish this book and the one before. However, if you put in the time and open your mind, this book goes above and beyond expectation. An amazing mix of science, philosophy, and anthropology.

Prep for an alien invasion

Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest is the sequel to the Three Body Problem. At this point, Earth is beginning preparations for the expected invasion 4 centuries in the future. Due to total surveillance by the Trisolarans sophons, a unique program is arranged where four individuals are given free rein to devise their own plans with the strategic intent kept only in their heads. Termed the wallfacers, the Chinese participant devises a strategy to "hex" a star. Following several centuries in hibernation he awakes to find himself a disgrace, along with the rest of wallfacer program and an upbeat Earth believing their technical dominance over the eventual invasion. The "hexed" star is destroyed and the Earth's military might is decimated by a single Trisolaran probe and Lou Ji is redrafted to an eventual one man against an entire civilization stand-off.

The sci-elements include sophons, subatomic AI that allow for total surveillance and inhibit scientific development. Earth's spacefaring technology advances in an unremarkable fashion. Alien tech remains largely inscrutable. Most intriguing is cosmic sociology that forms the basis of the star hex as well as a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox.

The narration is well done with reasonable character distinction. Pacing is good.

Wonderful follow up

I enjoyed this on more than the first. It is a fantastic follow up and it brings more to the table without being too much. The twists and turns are wonderfully thought out and in line with the story telling. This alleviates any Deus ex machina type revelation.

It's main theme shares with many other great sci fi novels/universes and conveys it uniquely.

Great job.

Dull Start, Strong End

This is a trilogy, not independent books in a series. If you haven't read the 3 Body Problem, put this down and go read it.
The handful of bad reviews seem to come from people who never finish the series after stopping somewhere in the first half of this book. It can be slow, but it ends strong and I felt the first half made more sense when given context by the second half.
Aside from the pace of the first half, my only complaint is that no book comes out completely unscathed from a translation. I had the nagging feeling that I was missing some subtleties that were lost in the translation, and worse, I had the sense that some unnatural dialog was added when the translation may have been unclear.
Overall, a very enjoyable book that left me eager to start the 3rd book.

Miss the original narrator

Love the story, can't wait for the third installment to come out on audible. The narrator from "the three body problem" did a much better job. It was much easier to discern characters from his performance. It's not to say that this narrator is bad, I just hope they use the original one on the next book.

My favorite Book in a while

This book is my favorite of the series. I was fully invested from the start and enjoyed every minute of it.
The amount of scientific detail that goes into these books is amazing. The writing style is some of the best I have read. Cixin Liu is amazing at establishing metaphors and really helping you understand his characters and what they are like and what they are feeling. I have never felt so connected to a book series before.
I loved how long the books are too.