>>25263023
Fags here think its reddit
Its a great series, real science, truly aliens aliens, and insane scale
Maybe the show cant make it better since the book kinda suffers from underdeveloped characters but the show is wokemaxxing

>>25263023
I think it's shit even by sci-fi standards and it was a dreadful experience to get through, each book being worse than the preceding one

>>25263077
What's good scifi for you? Genuinely asking

>>25263023
First book was good in the first half, tedious and boring in the second half. Second book was amazing. Haven't read the third one yet.

I'm on mobile so I'll keep things short. I would have written a detailed post at the character limit otherwise.

Anyway the books are fantastic in two ways. First just the general science fiction which is amazing and somehow only gets better throughout the books with the first one being a 7/10, second one being a 8/10 and the third one being a 10/10.

The second way it's a great book series is that it was actually used as a way to blame the Chinese communist party by the author because in 2006 the censorship in China was at all-time lows. So every book properly educates you about the horrors of Chinese communism and the crimes and mindset of the CCP.

The books got so popular in China and prestigious internationally that right now the CCP can't retroactively censor the books anymore. They are kind of forced to have this grandfathered work that is shitting on the current ways of Xi Jinping and the entire underpinnings of their government and ideology. Which is what makes it a genius work.

That said, even if you don't care about the politics and just want some good science fiction read them. And again the first book could be considered mediocre but enjoyable, this doesn't mean the rest of the series is of similar quality. If anything the first book is more of setup and a prequel to the real story for the third book. The story was originally published as short stories in a magazine so they were never meant to be three separate books, it's just one continuous story.

>>25263023
Good ideas, bad writing and characters. Most sci fi books are like this though so I guess it’s okay.

>>25263174
I love Dick, pun intended
Solaris was a really compelling read
Used to read lots of pulp and those had the occasional nugget of quality. Naked to the stars for instance was one that stuck with me
Meteo 2034 was surprisingly good given how bad 2033 was
Lovecraft if you count that
Mind you these are books that I consider good and happen to be sci-fi. I don't have a theory of what "good sci-fi" is supposed to be like nor have I ever cared to come up with one despite consooming lots of it growing up. Don't care for that genre talk, it's lame as hell

>>25263200
Thanks for the recs

>>25263023
I haven’t read it and I probably never will but I will always hate this author and this book series for destroying my ability to find videos and articles about the dark forest theory solution to the Fermi Paradox without having to sift through a bunch of crap about this book series. Kind of like how The Matrix film series has permeated and cheapened the entire simulation hypothesis discussion

>>25263223
He invented the dark forest theory. The theory is named after the title of the book, not the other way around, retard.

You never looked up the dark forest theory before the book came out because it termed it.

Your matrix comparison does not make sense since this wasn't the case for the simulation hypothesis.

>>25263235
>He invented the dark forest theory.

Wrong. At very most the name he used stuck, and I doubt he even came up with that name first

>>25263223
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

>The hypothesis derives its name from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest[2]

If you find this stuff interesting I highly recommend you read the series because the dark forest hypothesis is not the most profound idea the books propose. The third book introduces a concept I never considered which I will not spoil which made me legit rethink reality for a bit, I don't think it got a proper hypothesis categorization yet either and it flew over most people's heads because you need to know a bit of physics to understand the implication which the general reader lacks.

>>25263251
>although similar concepts predate the work.[3][4]

Conveniently cut off why Hmmmmmmmm????? Dishonest prick

>>25263252
No I just didn't refresh the page and didn't see you replied already. Anyway the dark forest hypothesis in the form as described on Wikipedia IS the Liu Cixin version of the hypothesis, not the earlier von Neumann one which was more general and didn't take into account time dilation and intelligence explosions as an important argument for why more advanced species need to eradicate lesser ones out of self preservation. The "original hypothesis" as you probably know it is now split off into the berserker or von Neumann probe hypothesis, they are similar but have different assumptions and therefor should be separately considered.

Still, read the books. I'm 99% sure the third one will blow your mind and you never thought about the introduced concept there before.

>>25263261
>No I just didn't refresh the page and didn't see you replied already.

I was mostly just trying to be funny anyway by being more aggressive than what’s warranted. Idk, maybe I’ll give them a look. I’m really not a big sci-fi reader though so you might as well spoil it

I finished the first book but the prose was so bad I just couldn’t stomach the idea of going on.
>he shot him in the head and he died
>he deftly broke his neck, killing him instantly
-tier type writing

>>25263023
The writing itself was very dry I found but the concepts were interesting enough to carry it. Toward the end I got kind of tired of the way humanity is portrayed to be completely crab-in-a-bucket mentality over and over again but then I remembered the whole CCP stuff in the first book and it made more sense. Basically, the author took that mentality to the logical extreme to show how it could prevent species advancement and survival.

>>25263316
It was deliberate criticism of the CCP by the author in a thinly veiled way as to not get "reeducated" by the state.

To give some historic context. The first novel came out during Jiang zemin reign as leader of China and he was very hands-off "everything allowed as long as you succeed economically" the second and third books came out during hu Jintao as paramount leader of China and he had a more hardline stance towards censorship, which is why the second and third books are more cryptic with its criticism of the CCP through allegories or depicting the soulless behavior of the human characters in the novels. Nowadays the novels would straight up not be published under the Xi regime.

I feel like in the western translations they should gave a preface section explaining this historic context so the human behavior in the 2nd and 3rd book make more sense instead of people constantly writing "the characters are wooden and irrational" as a point of criticism because they lack context.

>>25263352
I had enough knowledge of it to understand what was happening in the first book but with all the other shit going on in the second two I just forgot about the roots of the story. Then once I remembered the opening everything clicked into place. I also watched the Netflix show and they went really hard on making it clear the tri solarins are supposed to be the direct foil to the humans with the "if one of us survives, we all survive" mentality.

>>25263036
Firat book was interesting. Second book sucked, terrible romance, awful time skip over what could have been one of tje most interesting parts of the series. Didn't bother to read the third book after that desu

>>25263729
First and second books are merely setup for the grand reveal of the third book. It was originally written as a single story that was published month by month before being bundled as a trilogy of books. It makes no sense to read only one of them in isolation. However if you didn't enjoy the "teardrop" scene of the 2nd book you should drop it because the 3rd book is essentially fully focused on similar concepts and scenes but taken to the extreme.