It’s like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.
-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the ‘friends’ act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They’re constantly insulting or hitting each other. It’s just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.
-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they’ve essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.
-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.
-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.
I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.
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Nah, I’m not gonna be as uncharitable as all that (beyond the snark in my original post). Online western leftists have diegetic essentialism built into them as a survival mechanism, so when chuds deliberately push their reading of dark forest theory (and to be fair, it is very easy to see how Game Theory Law of the Jungle, Kill or Be Killed can be read that way) it sets off their Hitler particle detectors. I don’t blame them as it’s probably the most common take they’d encounter online.
The defensive realpolitik ‘Keep your Head Down’ reading is only apparent if you’re familiar with China’s recent history and foreign policy decisions post-Deng.
Are you up to date with internal Chinese geopolitical thought? Is the US’s stupid aggression on Taiwan and the self defeating trade war being viewed as a refutation of the idea that tbp is apparently putting forth that China could “keep it’s head down” ?
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Thank you for the context.
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The part I don’t get is the response - flee, fight, infiltrate, asimilate, but hiding from us aggression isn’t possible. Plus, like… the US can’t do what happens in TBP. Murder and genocide, yes, but the fickle, unstable, easily bored empire is constantly getting pushed back or defeated by nations that are vastly weaker on paper.
If tbp is supposed to endorse trying to “hide” from America all I can really come up with is that the author grossly and terrifyingly fails to understand the source and goals of american aggression.
And another thing - the trisolarans are fucked. They’re fleeing their ultra-hostile home system where their annihilation could happen at any moment due to the orbital pattern of their stars. They need to leave, and once they leave they need to conquer earth because they have no where else go go.
The USA is very much the opposite. It’s a natural fortress that has all or almost all of the resources needed to maintain itself indefinitely located within it’s own borders. US imperialism is premised on the Capitalist drive for infinite profit. We’re after cheap resources and cheap labor. If it weren’t for the US’s imperialist ideology the US could quite comfortably fort up in North America for a very long time.
The Trisolarans aren’t an Imperialist power the way such powers exist on earth. There have been a few armies of exiles that have shown up somewhere, wrecked the place, and taken over but that’s not the state of politics on earth and never was on any scale. The Trisolarans have a survival imperative that provides a justification within the story for their zero-sum, all or nothing invasion of Earth.
The equivalent of that in America is the
infesting our leadership, not any actually existing material problems. The only real barrier to, if not some utopian friendship, at least peaceful coexistence with China is our economic system. We overthrow capitalism, the primary motivation for conflict falls away.
The author doesn’t care about the source or goals of american aggression. The author is more concerned about the effects of american aggression on his country. The author is Chinese and familiar with Chinese history, and is also aware of what happened to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn’t want that devastation visited upon his country, so he wrote a sci-fi parable about the wisdom of Dengist foreign policy and the dangers of discarding that foreign policy and attracting american imperial attention before military technological parity was achieved.
I’m sorry, this turned in to a diatribe. I’m really, really, really frightened and it mostly stays buried under a layer of cynicism and irony and distraction, but it broke through here. I’m terrified of this awful country.
Original post follows;
It is essential to victory to understand what your enemy is doing, why they are doing it, and why they think they are doing it.
America’s aggression is not based in what most people would consider rational thought. Americans are so utterly, blindly, deludedly convinced of their natural and divine superiority that most of them are not able to conceive of “military parity”. MAD was only barely able to contain US aggression and avert a general nuclear exchange. If even a few dozen government and military positions had been occupied by different men America would have committed to a full launch and considered the destruction of most of America’s population and much of the world an acceptable price for destroying the Soviets and Chinese.
America cannot accurately perceive China’s defensive capabilities. It cannot accurately perceive it’s own vulnerabilities. It will launch in to a war it can’t win out of sheer arrogance and bloodlust. Normally an enemy like that would be easily defeated, but America’s second strike capability and outright insanity makes defeating America in open combat suicidal. China might reach a point where they could destroy the us carrier fleet, there’s a good chance they already can. But if they can’t kill the entire nuclear triad in an overwhelming first strike they’re flipping coins on annihilation.
America is something new in history - the blind mad bloodlust of fascism armed with a nuclear second strike capability that could destroy every major population center in china.
So that’s what i don’t understand. How any of the attitudes and actions in tbp could constitute a defense against America. I get that this is an old book, and with Obama coming on to the stage at that time it was easy to be misled about the beast and maybe think that change was possible, but it seems hopelessly naive. America doesn’t kill for self defense, or for resources. Killing is what America is. It’s a self sharpening weapon with no master that destroys because that is it’s nature. You can’t hide from that, or turtle up behind walls. If defense is even possible you must infect it with something that will cause it to rot from inside and collapse, and hope that in collapsing it doesn’t crush the whole world, or else kill it completely in a single moment of overwhelming violence that leaves nothing left alive to retaliate. I don’t see any wisdom or strategy in what Liu Cixin is discussing. It’s all premised on game theory, rational self interest, and that does not apply to America. This is a strategy for dealing with a wolf, but they’re facing a rabid dog.
I don’t know if you live here, or deal with Americans, but the thrill and the joy in their voices when they, unprompted, begin talking about how many hundreds of millions or billions they could kill if only they could destroy the Three Gorges Dam or interdict the Malacca Strait is horrifying. I don’t have words for it and I’m terrified that the rest of the world doesn’t understand what we are.
Yes, very good, except that I don’t think the sci-fi author is directing foreign policy here, he’s just writing about his own fears of the future of his country into his fiction.
If this were true we’d all be radioactive dust right now. Ask yourself: what would China going to war with America achieve? Especially at any point in history prior to the present day, when China had less military and economic capabilities than it does now? Is China’s continued existence as an independent nation not, at the very least, a nod to the efficacy of Deng’s “keep a low profile” foreign policy, at that particular historical context? Is it so strange that Liu Cixin would want a continuation of that?
Being a leftist means you believe that a better world is possible. Americans are just like everyone else: people bound by their material conditions. Which means that when those material conditions change, people can change too. Any other belief is hyperbolic idealism and not historical materialism.
I don’t live in America, and I don’t deal with Americans in my day to day life. But it seems to me that you’re the one who doesn’t understand the rest of the world, of it’s resilience and bravery.
Very good points, thank you for replying. I suppose I need to go pick up some of the CPC’s publicatons and Xi’s books.
Saw your edit. Hey, it’s ok. I get it. We live in the middle of the coin flip of history and not knowing which side it’ll land on is scary.
All we can do is do what we can.
Thank you for being kind.
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Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?
Is it accurate to say that the books can be read as an interrogation of recent Chinese history (from a modern, maybe somewhat liberal perspective), and it’s trajectory? I haven’t read books 2 & 3 to comment on them further.
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Yeah, I had vague recollections about this, along with Deng’s foreign policy which is what I based my reading of the book on.
Yeah, in this thread I was trying to simplify and make the analogies as obvious as possible but what you said is true, we should be focusing on the questions the books provoke.
Sounds about right tbh
Its really amazing how Liu can accomplish conveying such thought provoking, heavy themes, while at the same time making his novels addictive to read.
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Okay, true, frequently encountered issue with trying to portray America realistically in fiction.