One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2016 (English translation)

Read: February 2021

Publisher Summary: In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion – in just four centuries’ time…This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four men enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike.

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: 8/10

Opening Sentence: The brown ant had already forgotten its home.

Who Should Read This?

• Game theorists
• Political scientists who think Earth’s current problems are too simple
• Friends and foes of humanity
• You made it through the first book? Good. Now the story really gets going.

Notable Quotables (may include spoilers)

• “You may be familiar with human history, but you will probably find this hard to comprehend: Who goes and who remains involves basic human values, values which in the past promoted progress in human society, but which, in the face of ultimate disaster, are a trap. Right now, the majority of humanity has not realized how deep this trap is. Lord, please believe my words. No human can escape this trap.”
• “You’re just the sort of asshole that always sees society as trash.”
  “Bullshit. The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn’t any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics. The truth always picks up dust. A small number of people could fly off into space, but if we knew it would come to that, why would we have bothered in the first place?”
  “Bothered with what?”
  “Why would we have had the Renaissance? Why the Magna Carta? Why the French Revolution? If humanity had stayed divided into classes, kept in place by the law’s iron rule, then when the time came, the ones who needed to leave would leave, and the ones who had to stay behind would stay. If this took place in the Ming or Qing Dynasties, then I’d leave, of course, and you’d stay behind. But that’s not possible now.”
• “No, no. Don’t say where we are! Once we know where we are, then the world becomes as narrow as a map. When we don’t know, the world feels unlimited.”
• Human rights and equality have deep roots. Inequality of survival is the worst sort of inequality, and the people and countries left behind will never just sit and wait for death while others have a way out.
• How are we supposed to know whether or now you have already started work?…How are we supposed to know whether or not you are working?
• “Besides, I’m not a good soldier at all. A soldier who’s only willing to engage in a winnable war in unqualified to be one.”
• But now, as he floated in the vast void, he felt like his contact with the blue world down below had been cut off. He was an independent presence in the universe, unattached to any world, dangling in the cosmos, no ground beneath his feet and surrounded by empty space on all sides, with no origin or destination, like the Earth, the sun, and the Milky Way. He simply existed, and he liked this feeling.
• “If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”