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chris_gerribSo, I mentioned yesterday that I would have more thoughts anon regarding The Dark Forest, Book 2 of the Three Body Problem series. Anon is now, and my thought is "how do you say "flying snowman" in Chinese?"
Flying snowman is a reference to a John Scalzi piece about suspension of disbelief in fiction. Scalzi's argument in a nutshell is: "But if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding."
I found an aspect of The Dark Forest to be inconsistent and frankly stupid. Without being too spoiler-y, a human spacefleet goes out to meet an alien probe. The humans adopt a formation that puts their ships at extreme close range to each other and in a very regular order. This results in the destruction of the entire fleet. I found it such a glaring and basic military mistake that it kicked me out of the story for a bit. It was also unnecessary - destruction of part of the fleet would have served the story equally well.
In other thoughts, the novel is a trilogy. Most trilogies have the second book ending on, if not a cliff-hanger, a place where there's a clear "to be continued" point. Dark Forest ended on such a seemingly-final note that I had to look at the publisher's description of Book 3 to see where it was going. Despite my reservation above, so far I find the series very interesting.
Flying snowman is a reference to a John Scalzi piece about suspension of disbelief in fiction. Scalzi's argument in a nutshell is: "But if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding."
I found an aspect of The Dark Forest to be inconsistent and frankly stupid. Without being too spoiler-y, a human spacefleet goes out to meet an alien probe. The humans adopt a formation that puts their ships at extreme close range to each other and in a very regular order. This results in the destruction of the entire fleet. I found it such a glaring and basic military mistake that it kicked me out of the story for a bit. It was also unnecessary - destruction of part of the fleet would have served the story equally well.
In other thoughts, the novel is a trilogy. Most trilogies have the second book ending on, if not a cliff-hanger, a place where there's a clear "to be continued" point. Dark Forest ended on such a seemingly-final note that I had to look at the publisher's description of Book 3 to see where it was going. Despite my reservation above, so far I find the series very interesting.
