The Dark Forest

Liu Cixin was born in Beijing. His father was a manager at the Coal Mine Design Institute while his mother taught elementary school. During the Cultural Revolution, Liu’s father joined the Communist Party, but Liu’s paternal uncle joined the Nationalists. After the Communist side achieved victory, Liu’s father came under scrutiny because his brother was a Nationalist, which led Liu’s father to lose his job and be sent to work in coal mines in the Shanxi Province. Liu has said that a childhood encounter with Jules Verne’s novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth was pivotal in shaping his future career as a writer. Liu went on to attend the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power and then became a computer engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant. While working as a computer engineer, Liu would write at night. He published his first book, The Devil’s Bricks, in 2002 and followed that with two novels before publishing the novel The Three-Body Problem. The Three-Body Problem was first published in serial form in the magazine Science Fiction World in 2006 and was published as a book in 2008. The Three-Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, for which Liu is best known. The second book in that trilogy is The Dark Forest and the third is Death’s End.

Though The Dark Forest takes place in the future, several events draw from historical precedent. In particular, Rey Diaz’s pursuit of ever-larger nuclear bombs specifically references the global arms race as nuclear bombs were developed during World War II. Rey Diaz’s proposed plan as a Wallfacer—to destroy the Solar System through nuclear weapons—echoes the threat of nuclear annihilation that defined much of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, though Rey Diaz plans to use those bombs to destroy the entire Solar System, not just Earth as a planet. In the novel, the Great Ravine is a period of global economic hardship. The name the “Great Ravine” is a reference to the Great Depression, a similar period of global economic hardship that occurred from 1929 to 1939. The dark forest hypothesis put forth in the novel is proposed as a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox refers to the question asked by Enrico Fermi in 1950 about why there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life even though the expansiveness of the universe suggests that such life likely exists. The dark forest hypothesis—that the universe is akin to a dark forest with limited resources in which hunters (representing alien civilizations) try to remain undetectable to avoid risking potential annihilation—is named after Liu’s novel, though Liu was not the first to suggest similar ideas.

The Dark Forest is the second book in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The first book in that trilogy is The Three-Body Problem and the third book is Death’s End. The English translation of that trilogy’s name—Remembrance of Earth’s Past—is a reference to Marcel Proust’s most well-known work, his seven-part novel that was first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past (it is now more often translated as In Search of Lost Time). In The Dark Forest, Liu references the novel Floating City by Liang Xiao Sheng when discussing escapism and the desire for people to leave Earth to flee from the Trisolarans. Liu has also said that authors Arthur C. Clarke and George Orwell have influenced his writing the most. Liu credits Clarke’s writing with exposing him to the wonder of science fiction while raising questions about how humans relate to the universe, while Orwell showed Liu how science fiction could be used to critique society. Some of Clarke’s most well-known works include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, and Childhood’s End. Orwell’s most well-known work of science fiction is 1984, and Orwell also wrote the allegorical novel Animal Farm about the 1917 Russian Revolution.