The Dark Forest

By: Cixin Liu, Joel Martinsen - translator

Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan

Length: 22 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Soon to be a Netflix original series!

"Wildly imaginative." (President Barack Obama on The Three-Body Problem trilogy)

This near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking listeners to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from Cixin Liu, China's most beloved science fiction author.

In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion - in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. 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.

Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy

The Three-Body Problem

The Dark Forest

Death's End

Other books

Ball Lightning

Supernova Era

To Hold Up the Sky (forthcoming)

©2008 Cixin Liu (P)2015 Macmillan Audio

Maybe it's me...

Any additional comments?

This is great science fiction in the mold of The Foundation Trilogy. Yes, it's that good. Characters are distinctive and well developed, the story is compelling, science (fiction) based and not fantastical, the translation is absolutely amazing (not that I speak Mandarin, but the English idioms are natural). Maybe it's me, but I did not like the narrator in Three Body. His characterizations were exaggerated, cartoonish and detracted from the seriousness of the storyline. Ochlan is measured, serious, well-paced and brings enough distinctiveness to the characters to make listening easy and enjoyable.

Excellent Second Book - Worth Struggling Through

As with many reviews of this audio book, I agree that the narration takes vastly from the experience. It was a hard book to get into (but well worth the work), and it was quite frustrating to have to struggle with what characters were speaking. I’d say re-record with Scott Brick and a cast of other characters played by other people.

5 Stars for Everything!

Mind blowing and one of the best narrations ever. Anxiously sweating out translation and audiobook of third book in trilogy, "Death's End." Not since Dune have I been so engaged in an epic.

Bad Narration and Too Much "Literary Noise"

First of all, the narrator of this book, PJ Ochlan, is much worse than the narrator of the first book, Luke Daniels, in all areas of performance except for a marginally better pronunciation of only some Mandarin names. Note that the keyword there is "marginally". PJ Ochlan's voice and tone often don't change appreciably for different characters, not only making it difficult to distinguish between who's talking in conversations, but also frequently failing to reflect the individual qualities that the author had clearly ascribed to the different characters in the story. For example, one of the main characters, the police captain "Da She" was clearly described as being "rough", "rude", and "burly" by the author. In the previous book, the narrator Luke Daniels had at least tried to bring those qualities out for this character which at least clearly distinguished the character along those lines. But in this book, PJ Ochlan made the character sound completely bland, generic, spiritless, and even emasculated, often being almost no different from the voice of another male main character "Luo Ji", who engaged in frequent conversations with "Da She" throughout much of the story, all of which made it difficult to enjoy listening to the narration overall. I think the narrator of an audiobook should at least possess talents in bringing the personas of the different characters to life through their distinct voices and speech patterns. Otherwise, why would anyone who's not blind want to listen to an audiobook instead of just reading the story in print?

Listening to PJ Ochlan's narration has been such an unpleasant experience that I don't want to listen any further in this book, and I'm not even halfway through. Seeing that the next book in the trilogy is also narrated by PJ Ochlan, I'm faced with a dilemma. In order to avoid listening to his bad narration, I would have to purchase the ebook from elsewhere to read the story in print, but that also feels like a waste of my Audible subscription. I'm also wondering who was responsible for hiring PJ Ochlan to narrate not one, but two, of the books in this trilogy? What were they smoking? Seeing such blatantly poor decision-making at Audible really drives me more than up the wall, but also causes me to want to side with any potential future alien invasion in the real world to exterminate these dumb humans in real life.

Secondly, the author Liu Cixin, like almost all other authors of any genre, seems to think that fanciful descriptions and detailed analogies of scenery and people necessarily enhance the reader's experience. Well, to me, they don't, but cause the opposite effect. Even worse, the author engages in all-too-frequent and overly detailed descriptions of persons and sceneries through what seems like interminably long passages throughout much of the story, where predictable expectations of analogies wrap up every such description, all in the overused formulaic styles of almost every single TV show, movie, and novel that I can remember, where any truly intelligent reader and observer could almost always predict where the romance or drama scenes will play out around the corner, or where prolonged and descriptive "beautiful prose" and analogies will appear. The resulting overall experience, for this reader/listener, at least, feels like eating the same meal, every meal, for an entire lifetime. Yes, this is an indictment of the general storytelling patterns of all authors, and indeed of almost the entire discipline of "literature" as we know it.

My imagination would flow much more freely, and my enjoyment of the story would come much easier, without all of these literary chaff. It would be an understatement to say that I don't care one iota about descriptions like how the light from a fireplace danced around the body of some person to create a silhouette of some sort in the partial darkness and...blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...(did I mention blah?). For example, I have absolutely no patience or respect for these endlessly protracted scenes involving "Luo Ji" and the young woman "Zhang Yan", or to incredibly fussy descriptions like a woman's tears resembling the dew from whatever on whatever. As another example, I really found it to be an enormous waste of time listening to so much about the ants in the beginning of the story. Of course I understood what the author was trying to accomplish by writing about the ants in the beginning, because the purpose was too obvious and thus added nothing to my understanding and appreciation of the overall theme of the story.

To the many earlier reviewers who had gushed about the author's "beautiful prose", I say that this is supposed to be a SCIENCE FICTION story, not a girly romance novel! As such, to me, "beautiful prose" is absolutely a waste of time, and can only detract from enjoyment of a sci-fi story, which only needs the freshness of ideas to be exciting. I just want to get to the meat of the story quickly, without being bombarded with all of these sickening literary noise. Yes, I know that the author is a talented writer who's a master of words and prose, but he doesn't need to show me how talented he is with weaving flowery descriptions and fluid prose at almost every possible opportunity, because I'm not judging the author for some prose contest or literary beauty pageant, nor have any patience to do so, but just being a reader who wants to enjoy the essence of a science-fiction story.

From that perspective, listening to this story further reinforces my feeling that no writer or artist has yet truly made any groundbreaking advancement in the entire field of storytelling, regardless of genre, for all of modernity.

Perhaps the best SciFi I've ever read

I read the first book - The Three Body Problem, and then listened to the Dark Forest. Both books start strangely, and are full of mystery. And then, in both cases, bam! I just finished the Dark Forest and the last 30 minutes had my jaw literally dropping.

I really can't say much more, as any little hint would be a possible spoiler. And I would hate to spoil these wonderful surprises and aha moments.

But I will say that while this is "hard SciFi" it is also a sweeping view of philosophy and sociology.

At first, the numerous Chinese names will be confusing. But in the end there aren't that many characters. And the narrator does an excellent job of giving the characters different voices, and also wisely makes the choice to not give the Chinese speakers Chinese accents. But then the Japanese woman, some Germans and Russians, he does give them native accents. It's really rather a brilliant performance.

Well, off to download #3 - Death's End. I'm not usually a fan of trilogies and especially fantasy series, but this is most definitely an exception.

my kind of science fiction

I like that the story spans enense amounts of time and looks at the big picture.

A mystery that actually makes you think

Lou writes compelling, brilliant characters opposed by forces with insight and intellect to match their own. The defeats are resounding and painful when they appear, but that just makes the scant victories even more dear.

The voice acting was solid, but sometimes didn't make clear distinctions between characters.

unusual

The Chinese notions of culture and politics contextualizing science and discovery create a very non-Western setting for this novel. Also, directly translated Chinese idioms make for some unexpected and unintentional chuckles and occasional head scratching by the reader. I get there sense that some thematic elements may have been well understood by a native speaking audience brought up on classics and parables within that culture that were eluded to here, but because that foreknowledge was assumed they were not elaborated on here which left me feeling like an outsider when an inside joke was being shared by others. nonetheless, there were many interesting elements here. I look forward to completing this trilogy.

superb

The most sophisticated sci fi I've experienced. Narration, with all the different voices and accents, was the best of any book I've listened to.

Deep , thoughtful , refreshing

I could put down the first boot ... This one was just as good. Some interesting ideas .. So well written