62 pages • 2 hours read
Liu Cixin, Transl. Joel MartinsenThe Dark Forest
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Cixin Liu
Cixin Liu was born in 1963 in Beijing before moving to Shanxi where his parents worked in mines. While he was a child, Liu’s parents sent him to live with family in their hometown in Luoshan County, Henan, because of rising violence in Shanxi sparked by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The Cultural Revolution was a political movement that occurred under Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, with the stated aim of purging capitalist, traditionalist, and religious elements from China. The movement broke into violent factions. Economic activity was severely damaged as a result, and the nature of Chinese society and culture was altered permanently: The Cultural Revolution secured central power for Mao Zedong until his death in 1976. This period of Chinese modern history plays an integral part of The Three-Body Problem, in particular its presentation of political regimes and factions, theories of discipline and punishment, and the nature of civilizations when under threat. The first book of the trilogy is partly set during this time, framing the three-novel sci-fi narrative in this real historical context.
Liu graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988. Following this, he worked as a computer engineer in China’s energy sector until his career as an author flourished. The influence of his scientific training and expertise is clear in his writing, which relies on physics and theories of scientific philosophy. The idea that safety in the universe relies on staying hidden has been part of scientific and philosophical debate since the 1970s and engages with the Fermi Paradox (1950), an apparent contradiction in science between the likelihood of extraterrestrial life and the lack of conclusive evidence thus far. The impact of his career in natural and technological resources can also be traced in the “dark forest” theory of resource competition.
The author has cited the British science fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) and George Orwell (1903-1950) as important literary influences. The significance of their work in his own can be seen in The Dark Forest’s dark and often dystopian view of the motivations and behaviors of people in the effort to survive.
Liu is not only a novelist but a short story writer: He has won China’s Galaxy Award for literature nine times.
Ideological Context: Neorealism in Political Science
The Dark Forest uses concepts of political science to drive a narrative focused on a conflict between two civilizations. Political science is the study of different political groups, their activity and interactions with each other. The novel’s core theme, civilizations, act in competition with each other. In The Dark Forest, humanity and Trisolaris represent two different civilizations with different values but the same goal: survival.
The novel’s presentation of this interaction between two civilizations shows the influence of Neorealism, a theory of international political science which emphasizes power politics and perceives the forces of competition and conflict to be stronger than cooperative forces in a globalized world. In this theory, civilizations are seen as:
unitary rational actors existing in a ‘self-help’ system (i.e., one in which each state must fend for itself) […] concerned above all with survival and operating with imperfect information (Bell, Duncan. “Realism.” Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Neorealism was prevalent in the decades 1960-2000, leading up to the first publication of Liu’s trilogy in 2007. Its pessimistic view of international relations closely aligns with the character Luo Ji’s theory of the dark forest in the novel, in which the many civilizations of the universe are incentivized by self-interest to attack each other, operating preemptively on limited information. The tenets of Neorealism frame the novel’s exploration of interactions between civilizations in the Trisolarans’ attempts to eradicate humanity for their own survival on a more hospitable planet. It also underpins the solution: their acquiescence at Luo Ji’s threat to reveal their location, which turn their survivalist self-interest toward humanity instead of against.
Scientific Context: Quantum Physics
As a science fiction novel, The Dark Forest relies on scientific theory as an essential part of its plot, function and meaning, drawing on established scientific theories and advancements. The most prominent of these is the field of quantum physics or quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is defined as, “science dealing with the behavior of matter and light on the atomic and subatomic scale” (Squires, Gordon Leslie. “Quantum Mechanics.” Encyclopaedia Britannica). This field of science underpins humanity’s understanding of the universe, including space exploration. It is key to the novel’s plot and world-creation: The Trisolarans send sophons (an advanced form of subatomic device) to halt human advancement in quantum physics on Earth. They do this in order to control human activity and maintain their own technological superiority, in order to prevent the Earth from defending itself from Trisolar attack.
Quantum mechanics is a highly experimental and theoretical field on the forefront of modern scientific endeavor and, as such, lends itself to science fiction, a genre which engages with the role and reach of human understanding. In the 2000s, the existence and meaning of subatomic particles was not a widely recognized concept amongst the general population. Indeed, theories and discoveries at the time disrupted the accepted rules of physics in a way which was disturbing even to experts. This scientific context was ripe in the 2000s for literary development in a genre which relies on tropes of the unknown, the mysterious, the nature of the universe and human endeavor, often in deliberately challenging and unsettling ways. The Dark Forest utilizes the uncertainty and potential of quantum mechanics: The amount of unknown knowledge about the subatomic world gives the Trisolarans the opportunity to confuse humanity by scrambling their means of measurements and eradicating consistency in the results of their studies. Without a strong basis to know how the subatomic world should act, advancement for humanity is stalled.
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