All reviews copyright 1984-2017 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE DARK FOREST by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/19/2016]
THE DARK FOREST by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen) (ISBN 978-0-765-37708-1) is the second book of the "Trisolaris" trilogy. The first, THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, won the Hugo Award for 2014, the first translated fiction work to do so. (Well, maybe the second, because another translated work, "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, won the same year for novelette, and that category is announced before the novel category.) Anyway, the first and third books in this trilogy are translated by Ken Liu (no relation), but this middle volume is translated by Joel Martinsen. There is no change of tone that I can detect, so at least Ken Liu and Joel Martinson managed to give a consistent feel to the trilogy. (I'm assuming that volume three will not demonstrate any major dissonances.)
It goes without saying that as the middle book of a trilogy, THE DARK FOREST cannot really stand on its own. Without having read the first book, a reader might be able to follow what is going on, but not with the same understanding. The odd thing, though, is that the third book does not entirely seem necessary. I mean, it is clear that the end of THE DARK FOREST is, if not a cliffhanger, then at least open to multiple interpretations of subsequent events. But it does not feel as if it must be resolved; not everything in life has a well-defined end, and we don't get to find out how everything turns out.
Or maybe I've just been reading too much Frank Stockton.
[There does seem to be a bit of an inconsistency. On one hand, someone objects that research is being spent only on low-end tech (chemical/fission rockets rather than rather than fusion). On the other, he also says that there is only limited research on closed ecosystems, which I would think of as low-tech, at least in some sense. Maybe I'm just missing the point here, though.]