I read The Three Body Problem by the same author. I wish I didn't. By the third volume I was reading more like the way you keep watching a slow catastrophe unfold.
Not only does it paint an utterly depressing picture of the future and the Universe in general, but worse, the assumptions it makes about human nature basically imply this is a failed species.
Dune is often described as being about oil [1]. Similarly, TBP is mostly about Chinese nationalism and the politics involved with being economically intertwined with the United States while retaining an opportunistic military posture.
The message of TBP is hopeful in that the US and China are ultimately locked together against a universe of unknowns.
It totally goes off the deep end there at the end though, but this would be a hard book to write while living in China. The CPC wouldn't allow this kind of propaganda to be sold to the West if it didn't basically follow their party line. I mean, the author basically telegraphs this situation with the subplot about how the Terrans learn how FTL travel works.
The chapters where people are treated basically like grass, letting them dry out when conditions are unfavorable, and just hydrating them back to life when things get better - that's some seriously puke-inducing allegory. That's a world I would absolutely refuse to live in. Something is seriously wrong with a universe that produces that kind of outcome.
The Trisolarian world was definitely shitty, and it's pretty improbable that life would manage to thrive there, but I thought it was still interesting.
My problem with those novels shows up anywhere someone uses "pure logic" to solve some problem, but the logic is totally insane and nobody ever calls them on it. In fact the entire universe follows the same insane logic for some reason, and it dooms the whole place.
It does get kind of funny near the end when the author decides that the big crunch is going to happen after all. But then all of the alien races have stolen too much of the mass of the universe to hide in their own little pocket universes so it won't happen. The protagonists at that point return their mass to the universe, but given the logic of the rest of the series there is no chance that the alien races will do that, the universe remains doomed.
Well, you know, they're aliens. The books never describe what they actually look like but you can well imagine that they are some kind of insect like creatures which would be horrifying to us.
For many life forms even on Earth, going into stasis during difficult times is a completely normal occurence.
The books actually do describe the aliens. They look like the aliens from "Mars Attacks" [1], except their brains are bioluminescent and the patterns displayed involuntarily reveal their thoughts.
The thing that kept bothering me about that novel is that it treated the entire human race as if they had the emotional maturity and stubbornness of a toddler.
I was also a bit annoyed that the Trisolarians could mass produce these godlike sophons and never thought to use them to find non-inhabited solar systems to colonize. The third book did slightly explain this by having regions of space that broke their connection to home, but if you can produce thousands or millions of these things it doesn't matter so much if you lose some.
The logic of "in order to prevent other species from using up the resources in our universe we have to destroy the universe" never really worked for me either. The third book had a low level flunkie in an alien race launch an attack that would doom the entire universe at the speed of light with only the approval of a low level middle-manager. I'd almost say it was a parody except that the books took themselves so seriously.
I saw it as a uniquely Chinese perspective on humanity. As the series helpfully reminds you, barely 40 years ago, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a collective self-inflicted madness which we would find difficult to imagine.
With that as your history and living memory, it's not surprising if your opinion of humanity's emotional maturity isn't as high as it could be.
> As the series helpfully reminds you, barely 40 years ago, China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a collective self-inflicted madness which we would find difficult to imagine.
I grew up in the "communist" Eastern Bloc. I can easily visualize that type of event.
I still don't buy it - neither the premises of that trilogy, nor its conclusions.
At the end I was like - there's got to be a better way, or else this is a pointless Universe.
The books had a few points to make, even if it cut some corners to make them.
1. Humans are bad at real long term (generations or more) planning.
2. Humans have been successful because of their ability to trust each other. This works okay on Earth, but if they live in a universe that is actively hostile towards this, it could turn us into a doomed species.
3. Conversely, an entire universe of species that go around destroying each other on a whim is also doomed for everyone.
The only resolution seems to be that maybe if groups of both species that want to peacefully coexist can find a third place to inhabit together, they may be able to find a compromise even if their original races end up wiped out completely.
My take on the "why are we behaving this way" was that, if you find intelligent life:
a) Its probably either very far behind or very far ahead of you.
b) Civilizations that are very far behind you can jump to being very far ahead of you "overnight"
c) Civilizations that are very far ahead of you can launch a preemptive strike that is guaranteed to destroy you.
d) Civilizations can modify local space to put themselves in a "stone-age" from which they cannot escape, thereby proving "we are not a threat".
Rationally, the only thing to do is destroy any civ you can, or preemptively take yourself out of the game.
An example of (c) was that Civilizations living in a n-dimensional universe could, if advanced enough, figure out how to modify themselves to live in an (n-1)-dimensional universe and then convert the n-d universe into an (n-1)-d universe that only they (and a few other clever civs) could survive in. Harsh. But rational.
Except of course you can escape from the Light Tombs using the pocket dimention door thing from the end of the book. That's another thing I found insane, in order to prove to the universe that you are not a threat you alter the speed of light in a solar system sized area in a way that the entire universe can easily see. If that isn't threatening I don't know what is. It doesn't even protect you from attacks!
The logic that "if you see someone, you must kill them" is kind of like "the first country that develops nuclear weapons must immediately deploy them against every other country, even thought that dooms the world to a nuclear winter." It's super-villain logic that ignores all of the other potential solutions--like diplomac--and ignores the MAD component of being able to easily destroy solar systems.
The entire reason given that alien species can't coexist is due to limited resources, but the Dark Forest mindset means they'll never be able to use those resources in the first place and at the end of the day they end up destroying all of them anyway. It's self defeating, and logically they should be able to figure that out.
The book feels like it's written by some game theory nerd who can't look past the first order equations.
>The logic that "if you see someone, you must kill them" is kind of like "the first country that develops nuclear weapons must immediately deploy them against every other country, even thought that dooms the world to a nuclear winter."
Except that they don't live on a planet, the weapons aren't nuclear, and they don't have spies or reconnaissance planes and satellites that can determine whether the other side really has them or not in near real time.
When we were looking at the SDI, some people argued that SDI was bad because it would allow us to launch a preemptive first strike without any consequences, while other argued that that was a good reason to build it, and then use it immediately. So even in the case where we actually all live on the same planet and share the risk, some in the USA argued for what you claim is super-villain logic. That's what I though the books got dead right: humans are fucking stupid.
The alien weapons also destroy the universe, although in some cases they are able to escape before the destruction is complete. This was in fact the endgame strategy for alien races in the novels: Figure out a way to reform yourself in a lower dimension then destroy the dimension you are in, except that ended up being a completely retarded idea because there are already races in the lower dimensions and far far fewer resources for your race to exploit. They're jumping out of the fire and into a much smaller and still crowded fire.
If self-replicating automated interstellar probes are possible, then given the size and age of the galaxy, they're inevitable -- and then so is a galaxy that's rife with them.
So where are they? Either self-replicating interstellar probes are impossible, or we're the first or only civilization to approach the ability to launch them.
IMHO the answer is: Once you have the technology necessary to travel interstellar distances, you no longer need to. Species are stuck in their own solar systems because leaving doesn't make much sense. The resources (including available space) in our solar system are nearly unlimited at the human scale, why take a staggeringly expensive and hazardous trip to some distant solar system for just more of the same?
IMHO it is one of the best possibilities for the Fermi Paradox. Way better than the Dark Forest, we're alone, or all intelligent species destroy themselves alternatives. At least with this there is the possibility for our long range probes to make contact and exchange culture/technology.
Briefly, until the Earth was gobbled up for material to make new self-replicating interstellar probes. Evolution would ensure that the probes would be voraciously reproducing as quickly as physically possible.
The numerical argument that the age of the galaxy gives sufficient time that it should be well-covered with probes seems reasonable.
However, extending that argument to "...and the various probes will have then competed in a Darwinian struggle leaving only a few voracious survivors causing a galactic-scale grey-goo scenario." does not seem especially well supported.
Science wasn't a lie, there was just an artificial cap on it, one that those scientists wouldn't even hit in their lifetime.
And honestly, the cap seemed a bit contrived to me. I read it more that the Trisolarians headfaked all of humanity and three books later Humanity never realized it. There's more to science than smashing subatomic particles together. It would be quite the subversion of "Trisolarians suck at lying" meme that emerged later.
Not only does it paint an utterly depressing picture of the future and the Universe in general, but worse, the assumptions it makes about human nature basically imply this is a failed species.