Gotta say, this entirely is better than the Three Body Problem series. Those books aren't bad, just depressing and soul crushing. I do like the idea that the Dark Forest problem is only a thing that is a law if the person writing believes that all governments are, ultimately, like the PRC.
Just finished
Death's End this morning. Still mulling the trilogy over. While I must admire Liu's ambitions with the scope of the story, with its Big Ideas and a proper Clarke-esque story about the cosmos (which is so fucking refreshing after having to deal with grungy terrestrial sci-fi in recent years), I must say it's still quite flawed. His dialogue is stale, and it's so weird for him to spend so much time in characters' headspaces, and yet at the same time seemingly not really care about any of them. There's no real fulfillment of anyone's arcs and growth, aside from Ye Wenjie. I mean, he seemingly forgot about Wang Miao in the first one, and then forgot Shi Qiang, even though almost everyone finds Da Shi to be one of the few characters they liked. My god, he fumbles characters worse than
Asimov.
At the same time, his biases are... problematic. Apparently "feminized" societies are not fit to survive in the universe, if all the older men mansplaining the importance of the Swordholder to Cheng Xin meant anything. But hey, she lacked a
father, so I guess she's just some lost doe... my fucking god. And I rofled at his attempts to shit-talk liberal democracies. Sometimes, seeing him present certain behaviors as universally human felt more alien than Trisolaris, like people's distaste of Escapism.
Also
Death's End felt waaay too rushed and could have easily been a trilogy in and of itself. The first few hundred pages were minuscule in scope before the hundred, and not in a good way. We didn't get any good exploration of Galactic Humanity, or what happened to the Trisolarans, and so on.
Nevertheless, I will say that the stories had a huge impact on me. It gave me an insight into China, by seeing the things that seemed taken for granted by Chinese readers, but were shocking to me. It helped remind me of how much space there is in a light year, and how just how frightening gaps in technology can be. How many other sci-fi authors would have had the Trisolaran fleet be threatened by humanity's defenses, instead of having a lone fucking probe destroy our fleet while taking literally no damage?
They certainly have a big impact on this fic. It was reading
The Dark Forest that gave me the energy to start working on this fic. I even referenced it in the epilogue to
Worldfall, though admittedly I had only
heard of TBT before I finished the first fic. The second book is by far the best in my eyes, in that it focuses on the impacts of alien invasion stories that are often neglected- the culture shock, the anxiety in the long wait, the existential terror that the invasion brings... Not to mention the game theory of STL civilizations, something I feel does not get as much attention as it deserves. I suppose this story is my way of examining Liu's Dark Forest in great detail.
Then setting it on fucking fire. Uyghurs don't deserve being put in camps, Liu you fucking thumb-face.
TV Tropes has been on a downward spiral because of some of it's members behavior and some of it's members getting bored with the site. Likewise any people that worked on the previous work's page are either already here or will show up down the line when the story passes the 40K word mark. Either way a guilt trip about you being stuck on a plane from China to the USA will fall on deaf ears and make someone like me chuckle about it and that is about it.
