The boys carve through the second half of Cixin Liu’s sprawling, imaginative, and haunting The Dark Forest. Bagg has questions about how much we can trust our author and the characters he uses to make his plot work, while Dukes identifies the fact that the most important “character” in this novel is humanity itself. Regardless of your opinion of this quixotic book, you cannot dispute the ambition of its author—and his ability to transform his imagination into an ever-expanding epic.
Tag: Cixin Liu
Episode 91: “All Chess Pieces, No Chess,” or Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest, Part I
The premise of the Dark Forest, that Humanity must make a secret plan stored in our hidden thoughts to defeat an enemy that can spy on our every move, is wonderful. But the lads find the action in the first half a bit tepid, as Cixin Liu builds sets up the chess pieces we expect he’ll start knocking down in the second half of the book. There are some hot spots, and wonderful moments, including a depiction of the best group photo ever taken, but you have to read through a lot of narrative chaff to find htem.
Here is the video of a six year old watching Star Wars for the first time with his Dad. Hint, at the end, the kid says “It’s the most amazingest thing I’ve ever saw in my whole entire, whole entire, whole entire, whole entire life.”
And here is the Hildebrandt Brothers poster art for Star Wars, using models who were not actually Carrie Fisher or Mark Hamill.
Episode 89: “A Creeping Awareness” or Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, Part I
The Three Body Problem begins with an inexplicable series of tragic mysteries, most notably, that physics as we know it has stopped working. Slowly, the reader is given enough clues to start to suspect various causes, although halfway through, we still don’t really know what’s going on. Dukes has read it before, and Bagg has not, so they lads compare notes as to their experience of the creeping awareness of the disturbing truth dawning on the characters.