Books

The sequels went on forever, to the point that I figured out what the Dark Forest theory was early on and had to finish that book just to find out I was right. Characterisation is pretty non-existent, it’s true.

In the middle of reading it now. Its a dual effect. One is that its natively written in chinese so a lot of its cultural stuff like the beginning will go over english readers heads not knowing that the chinese people literally had an violent orwellian book burning period of their history against academia. I imagine it was an attempt to pull readers in emotionally but Its hard to be emotionally invested in a cultural history you have no knowledge of and its paced badly.

The second is that the sci-fi genre is unfortunately nearly universally populated by nerds with good ideas pretending to be writers. This results in very interesting ideas and thought provoking settings being brought low by eye wateringly boring characters, piss poor narrative through lines, souless or confusing writing style, ect. Go ahead and try to read an Asimov book or Dune and you'll realize This was always the case for decades at least.

In fairness to the authors its hard to tell a civilization spanning futuristic world ending drama while also keeping it grounded.

As an enjoyer of sci-fi you kind of just have to power through the slog of some dead writing to get to the interesting concepts. I've never had the pleasure of reading a harcore sci-fi novel that was also an excellently written character drama. The only soft sci-fi book that pulled off the balance and stuck the landing was The Martian.

I tried to read the book but good God it was so bad and so boring it took me months to get about halfway, then the show came out and I was like 'yes! Maybe this will give me motivation!' and I couldn't be bothered to finish that either.

Haven't read it, but the show was interesting enough for me to watch the entire season.

I definitely found many, maybe even most of the characters bordering on comically corny. But i hadn't read anything like it regarding the core stories and concepts, and those got the hooks in me. Maybe for a bit i was holding my nose to keep moving through the story, but at some point i just didnt care and had to read all three books, and in the end they're still a dear favorite. If the underlying story isn't doing it for you, you're only crazy if you force yourself to keep reading it.

Now that you mention it, yes. The characters are quite 2 dimensional and unlikeable (not all, but definitely important to mention).

That being said I thoroughly enjoyed the books and didn't stop too much on the characters. Under unlikeable, flat, awkward characters there was an interesting premise and good thinking to be had: living in a society that has no private thoughts; dark forest theory, life in a society after the end.
So what I did was take a big sip of suspension of disbelief and enjoyed the ride. The interest to see the conclusion of the story was enough to coast through all three of the books.

Also, I read those just before the hype. I first heard of the first book a few years before from an Adam Savage podcast and the premise stuck to me. So after reading the Witcher I wanted something sci-fi'ish and this hit the spot.

I liked the Chinese tv adaptation, didn't read the book, and won't watch the American version. I think the series was good largely because of the actors, not so much the plot.

I understand this community is about books, but I’m curious if anyone here who read this book also watched the Netflix series?

If so, do you hold a different opinion of the show?

Yeah. I struggled with the cringy romance sections. Very much a freshman entry. But the series as a whole does work well. The Dark Forest is huge improvement. it also had a different translator and has a different structure that I feel works better than the first.

I believe its the authors first book. It gets significantly better.

I was very happy to stumble upon this post. I’ve been struggling through The Dark Forest for what feels like forever. I’m usually a pretty voracious reader, but this series is like quicksand to me. It’s really really boring. I just keep hoping it will get interesting. It threatens to…and then starts sucking again. I never DNF books, but I’m so SO tempted here. Glad there are others out there!