The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest (2008) by Cixin Liu is the second installment in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. It is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed science fiction novels of the 21st century. Liu has become China’s most prominent science fiction writer and has enjoyed success both domestically and abroad. The novels’ settings focus on the past (1960s and 1970s), present, and future, respectively. In this series, Earth encounters an alien civilization in a nearby star system, the Trisolarans, whose solar system has three sun-like stars in an unstable system. In The Dark Forest, the Trisolarans have decide to destroy humanity to protect their own civilization.

Liu’s science fiction focuses on humanity’s technological advancement and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy explores the idea of human and non-human life elsewhere in the universe, and interactions between them. A dense and complex text, The Dark Forest focuses on conflict and how power imbalances and mutually assured destruction influence outcomes. The novel also draws on Chinese cultural influences which were the focus of the preceding instalment, The Three-Body Problem, particularly through an exploration of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1967-1977).

A bestseller in China, the trilogy was translated into English for an international readership in 2015.