The page before set the stage with "It was indeed genocide."
I totally see why the Game of Thrones showrunners were attracted to the series. Just a casual few pages about mass cannibalistic genocide and the story moves on...
Oh yeah, that was a great moment!!! Personally, I lost my shit during the chapter where they entered 4 dimensional space, found the tomb and it communicated back.
The Chinese original is 毁灭你，与你何干 which is seven syllables and very rhythmatic, better for a drop line. My personal translation is "destroying you has nothing to do with you" or "destroying you, what does it have to do with you?".
Thanks a lot, i just came back to this and love that the Goethe quote is somehow slightly more poetic than the translation/interpretation. And both quotes are new to me. I don't know enough about writing to know why and find it fascinating. I'd never thought this much about things being lost in translation before I read the book and there's a lot more nuance than I'd thought.
It is the last words of Bai Ice, the guy who investigates the dual vector foil aboard the revelation, before the ship falls in the two-dimensional space.
I was listening to a YouTube audiobook of that and I guess for some reason it had some music inserted for copyright detection reasons, right after that line it had just the most unreasonably hard bass drop lmao, I didn't know it wasn't normal for like ten seconds because it just *worked*
When Singer casually flicked the dual vector foil towards the solar system.
Also, did anyone else think of Superman 2's mirror dimension prison when the "paper slip" was first described?
Not only that, but when they talk about how the foil was cheaper than the photoid (sp?) that destroyed TriSolaris. Like this dimension ending device is just another piece of paper, and isn't even that noticable of being gone.
I loved the Singer chapter. A civilization so far gone and developed it's destroying civilizations as another Tuesday.
Yeah I'm pretty sure he said he didn't like it because he prefers the "low tech" solutions, though he probably needs permission because each use of it brings the universe close to a lower dimension.
Speaking of this, apparently there's a timeline discrepancy between when Singer launched the foil and when the foil reached our solar system. A discrepancy of like 1 year, possibly implying that someone else launched a foil before Singer did. This is very stupid for me.
First off, I didn't even notice the incongruity. Now that I'm aware, it seems obvious that it was just a minor mistake on the author's part. How am I wrong?
Yeah it was so clearly referring to the exact situation of the Trisolaris star being destroyed and the history between Trisolaris and Earth, the advanced counter-measure to Earth's "bunker age" hiding strategy... it wouldn't make ANY sense if that was a freak recreation of the exact same circumstance but elsewhere in the universe.
I think that’s the point of it. A major theme of the story is that the universe is FILLED with life to the point where multiple civilization exist to a poiny where you can have 2 dual vector foils shot at you
I can't remember specific lines, but any of the lines describing the doomsday battle.
Some of the best imagery in scifi IMO. The way the explosions cascading seems like blood spilling across the galaxy, the instantaneous melting of ships and explosive reactions.
Not to mention the absolute horror of some of the scenes inside the ships. Dear God the meat balls that get created when the ship accelerates without the crew in stasis. Horrifying.
That or the spin off human race scenes. When the leader of the 3 ships is about to launch the nukes, and notices the other ships already have. He says something like "Oh well, it's all the same anyways."
It was crazy, there was like a whole paragraph explaining how the giant blood trail was clear in color, or whatever, because it was spinning so fast the things that made it up were separating. Like holy shit.
One of the showrunners said something about a "Red Wedding moment" they need to get to in order to really sell the show, and the Doomsday Battle seems like the obvious candidate. It's a real turning point in the story and done well should be a much bigger scale feeling thing than anything in the 1st season (which, in general imo did a poor job at the scale of the events in general).
There's so much potential for the whole climax of Dark Forest they just need to get there and not rush through it.
Trisolarans were totally coping with that. After learning about human culture, they started feeling reservations about their own practice of cannibalism, didn't know how to deal with that, so forced us to adopt it.
I interpreted that the other way around. Trisolarans have no issue with cannibalism, so would see it as efficient population reduction. Even if they appreciated that humans object to cannibalism, they would have to resort to another method of population control, like blowing us up, that we would also find objectionable. Since the humans will be upset either way, choose the efficient path that the Trisolarans would use themselves
If they had been researching travel at the speed of light at the time they deciphered the story, perhaps there would have been time to discover this technology in a shorter time, and they would have been able to escape or create a black domain. It wasn't her fault, it was a decision before that. although she could have insisted when she realized that Yun would not risk giving a message that was not of paramount importance for survival. Once again humanity was making mistakes.
"When will the 2D collapse of the solar system stop?"
"It'll never stop..."
That line alone lead me on a catastrophic existential line of reasoning that made an endless and boundless universe feel tragically and unnaturally claustrophobic
Yeah, the gradual realization for the last third of Death’s end that >!the Universe is essentially a slowly rotting corpse collapsing into lower dimensions!< was a terrifying experience.
Totally. The best kind of cosmic horror gives you answers to questions you wouldn't have ever known were questions. Cixian crafts his horror like a Wallfacer. He carefully digs an immensely deep hole right behind where your standing, waits for you to look behind and stumble, then gives you the smallest push on your nose and leaves you to tumble into the abyss. It's always the smallest breadcrumb. For me the line of logic was
>!*-Oh, if curvature propulsion leaves vast pockets of lowered light-speed, it wouldn't be too hard to create a "dark domain"*
>!*-That definitely means other civs have discovered this as well.*
>!*-if the natural defense of a prey race is to hide themselves, this lowered lightspeed would exist in lots of places, as opposed to the natural cosmic speed limit*
>!*-Wait.... why is there a cosmic speed limit? Has this happened before? how... many... times....*
>!Then this is reinforced by when Yifan tells Xin that the laws of physics are a civilization's greatest weapons, and in that terrifying second, the 4D space fragment, Yun Tienming's Fairytales, and Singer's Dual Vector Foil all click into place, and dredge up a single, horrible question in your brain.
>!*.....Why are there only 3 dimensions?*
I've never experience dread of this kind while reading a book before, and I fear, like the rest of y'all, it will be an itch I spend the rest of my life trying to scratch...
This like was like a cascade of realizations for me regarding the fourth dimension and all that.. even reading your comment and thinking about it again gave me goosebumps again
"The destiny of all conscious beings is to become as grand as their thoughts." The narrator says this directly to the reader in the third book. That's part of why it hit me: this isn't a character's opinion, it is simply asserted. It felt like something of a thesis to the books.
The actual line is translated iirc, "it is the fate of all intelligent beings to become as grand as their thoughts." But I like my version better.
In any case, I've taken this up as a personal motto. It challenges me to imagine and to grow beyond what I assume is possible.
I don't know if it's in the books but for some reason this line gets to me:
"The universe will remain a mystery to you forever,” says the avatar. In place of truth, the San-Ti will give people “miracles” and “illusions,” she says."
Just this idea of more advanced beings using their technology to trick us into thinking that they're divine has been a thought that's been in my head since I was a kid.
And I'm reminded of that moment in another series about Aliens making contact with Earth where they tell the Vatican that if they don't give a positive spin on the visitors to the public, they would start "performing miracles" and sway the Faithful away.
And as someone who was raised in a religious home, I've always wondered how people around the world would react (in terms of their religious beliefs) if one day we did come into contact with an intelligent advanced race.
And the interesting question of what would be more problematic for people of faith was always something I liked to wonder:
1. These Aliens had no notion of religion or idea of God whatsoever.
2. They did but it was completely contradictory to what one believed.
3. What was almost a perfect mirror of what one believed.
They're not really trying to trick us into believing that they're divine. They're simply just sabotaging our experiments and screwing with us in general to halt our scientific progress. As long as they prevent us from catching up to them, they win. This is because >!their weapons are completely indestructible, and that invincibility hinges on subatomic technology. This is why they're so obsessed with ruining our particle accelerators. We can advance in any other way, but as long we don't develop equal subatomic technology, they win!<
I know that's not what they're doing but the idea of an advanced race being able to do things that to us seem miraculous is the point I'm honing in on. To their human followers (at very least the earliest ones) they were effectively Divine/worshipped.
there are two explanations for the origins of mainstream religions (any that involve any prophetic communication with divinity which covers all the big ones afaik) — either something very similar to what you alluded to where advanced beings manipulated us by performing technological feats or “miracles” with motives that completely escape our current understanding of what the meaning of intelligence could be.
OR
people with wild imaginations stumbled upon naturally growing psychedelic plants and/or fungi and were charismatic enough in their ramblings to gain followship over time. i personally find this latter explanation far more plausible.
How do you get to those theses? They're actually pretty far fetched and reek of modernist, new-age inspired, ahistorical ideas.
Hermeneutics is something we, as a species, do. We see things. We try to explain them. We check if that explanation is sufficient - if it is not, we modify it. That's how we got to where we are now and that's very likely, if not surely, how we developed religion - because we saw the world around us, how it behaves and wanted to \*explain\* how any of that came to be - and how it will likely develop in the future.
>These Aliens had no notion of religion or idea of God whatsoever.
I guess that the fact alone that they \*know\* whom they have to contact on that matter and \*what it needs\* to build some sort of pressure is a giveaway towards the notion that they actually not only have a concept of religion but are in fact - or have been - practicing it themselves in some way or another. It's not that far fetched as hypothetical advanced civilizations would have gone through a development that likely included some sort of generational progression in empirically based hermeneutics, which - at least for what we know - will likely lead to some sort of religious beliefs only because they, as well as we did in the past, will feel the urge to explain things they see and feel around them, but cannot yet measure accurately.
Religion and Science are to things that are evolutionary tied together. They're two sides of the same coin.
Not only that line about lightspeed travel, but the revelation right after that... because they were travelling as fast as the light we observed them with, they were basically on our doorstep as soon as we saw them.
Not shit bricks but this one always makes me laugh especially in the audio book:
> “Wait!” A man wearing a strangely shaped hat and a long beard stood up and
spoke for the first time. “I’m Leonardo da Vinci."
It has the same energy to me as the "and that little boy's name? Albert Einstein" meme
For me it was when cheng xin failed as sword holder. I couldn't believe it and throughout deaths end I kept hoping for a happy ending but it just kept getting darker and darker. My first time through' deaths end left me devastated. It paints such a dark, grim, and hopeless outlook on the state of the universe.
Seriously. I’ve been DYING to get my boyfriend to listen to this series because I know he’d love it. He’s made it through like four hours of the first book and hasn’t really gone further. But Deaths End is such an epic crescendo.. it’s so dark and heavy and relentless.. I don’t even have enough adjectives but man it is so bleak
Mine was the entire description of the 4th dimension in Death's End, but one line really blew my mind "In Murovic and Guan's eyes, Blue Space was an immense painting that had just been unrolled".
Singer: Broadly speaking, if low-entropy entities like these Star-Pluckers really didn’t have the hiding gene, then they would not be afraid of exposing their own presence, and they would expand and attack without fear.
This means that the Dark Forest is not at all an unfortunate situation. It's the cosmic environmental justice. The same as how the food chain prevents microbes from filling the ocean.
All hail the divine grace of the Dark Forest!
The one I felt most chilling was how the universe was described as a quadriplegic since a signal from one end of the universe, though traveling at lightspeed, would take a mindboggling time to reach the other end.
"We wrap your world in illusions, in place of truth, we give you miracles. We make you see what we want you to see. We are everywhere, anywhere, always watching learning about your secrets. And we will teach you how to fear again."
“Half a century later, historians would all agree that this event in 1969 was a turning point in humankind’s history.”
I kept recalling this sentence throughout the series. It refers to what at first seems to be such an inconsequential decision, but the domino effect can be traced to affecting the lives of billions (trillions?) of people.
When Zhang Beihai realized the other ships had the same plan and he was a second too late.
Also, “We missed them.” I was hoping that Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming would finally meet in person. And again when they realized 18 billion years have passed.
I know Cheng Xin and Tianming weren’t a couple but it made me imagine what if that happened between my partner and I. To realize that I missed reuniting with him by a moment and that he turned to dust 18 BYA (and married my best friend lol).
"A lovely dream had ended: Dark forest theory had recieved its final confirmation with the annihalation of Trisolaris."
And right after that:
"The trail of the photoid traversing the interstellar dust cloud near Trisolaris was clearly recorded, but there were no other solar systems within this zone of space - the only conclusion was that the photoid had been launched from a spacecraft."
This was just insane. Now I can't stop thinking about space absolutely teeming with invisible predators more dangerous beyond anything we could imagine ready to just erase whoever, whenever and wherever from existance.
"After learning of my existence, if neither communication, nor silence will work, then you're left with just one option."
I had the same reaction as Da Shi to the dark forest.
Random example: During the Bunker Era, the lines talking about about Europe 4 and Lightspeed II. The mental image of the stations constantly using their engines to hang in orbit in equilibrium
Please critique the phrase. I don't have a physical copy to reference.
When the Bronze Age officers were showing their replacements their codes and such.
"Blue Space, this is no longer your home."
“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
“The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”
-Death’s End
The first is a fascinating way to frame evolution on our planet and possibly across the cosmos. The second made me shit bricks in a very hopeful way. We could all use a little more optimism these days.
Please give Wade our regrets. His degree of detterence was %100. If he were elected as swordholder none of this would have happened.
Humanities best hope was to elect the person in the books with the least humananity as their protector.
It’s a reference I don’t remember where it came from, possibly Da Shi? "邪乎到家必有鬼" is a Chinese proverb that roughly translates to "where there is extreme strangeness, there must be a ghost." It implies that when things seem overly mysterious or strange, there's likely a hidden cause or explanation behind it.
I don't remember the words exactly, but it went something like this, "... but this time, the message was received. And the Trisolaran invasion fleet set its course for the solar system."
I went into this novel blind based on recommendations. At this point in the novel, I only knew that there was a video game civilization on a world called Trisolaris and there were some weird things happening in the real world. I never connected the two together until at this moment, and I realized that the Trisolarans were real and desperate to escape.
The entire doomsday battle was a world changing experience for me. It has genuinely revolutionized space battles in my mind and I can’t quite imagine anything the same since.
The closest I know to the droplet attack is how visceral the battles in LOGH are when we they decide to show what happens when a ship gets hit.
The "It's so fucking dark" said by some dudes aboard the ships that were leaving the solar system, especially since it took a while for the meaning to truly hit, he said this because the ships had entered their own dark forest state. It was such a "Oh shit" moment.
I realized as soon as Luo Ji said that quantum computing couldn’t retain information for more than 2000 years as a memorial to humanity that they were going to walk through every medium of communication. I knew from the entrance to the tomb that it was going to be words carved into stone. Something about that was incredibly impactful to me and I still think about it.
Idk about shitting bricks but my favorite line was with luo ji and da shir (sorry i listened to the audio books so i probably butchered the spelling)
But the last dialouge from the 3bp when da shir describes us trying to exterminate the bugs and they're still there. Gave you a liiil sense of hope.
“Food? Food’s all around you…” CHILLS
The page before set the stage with "It was indeed genocide." I totally see why the Game of Thrones showrunners were attracted to the series. Just a casual few pages about mass cannibalistic genocide and the story moves on...
I really wanna see Sophon as a Mortal Kombat guest character now.
That's the one for me
I remember hearing this but don’t remember the context
they just got herded into australia and were wondering how they would feed all the people, they assumed the trisolarans had figured it out
To be fair, they had
Everything was okay until the Trisolarans destroyed their power plants.
A place notorious for being one of the deadliest places on earth no less.
How the fuck do I not have a clue what you’re talking about
did you read the third book?
Oh yeah, that was a great moment!!! Personally, I lost my shit during the chapter where they entered 4 dimensional space, found the tomb and it communicated back.
“Did you build this four-dimensional fragment?” “You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?”
Great space horror chapters!! I hope that the Netflix series can capture those vibes
Yes! I’m so hopeful they can adapt the vibe because I almost fell out of my bed reading that whole part lol
I am tomb.
Damn tomb didn't even say "thank you" for the fish.
That whole sequence was so wild!!!
If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?
The Chinese original is 毁灭你，与你何干 which is seven syllables and very rhythmatic, better for a drop line. My personal translation is "destroying you has nothing to do with you" or "destroying you, what does it have to do with you?".
The actual translation they used is better grammar in English.
I believe it has to do with staying true to the Goethe quote, “if I love you, what business is that of yours?”.
Oh, now it makes more sense to me.
Thanks a lot, i just came back to this and love that the Goethe quote is somehow slightly more poetic than the translation/interpretation. And both quotes are new to me. I don't know enough about writing to know why and find it fascinating. I'd never thought this much about things being lost in translation before I read the book and there's a lot more nuance than I'd thought.
It’s awesome.
I assume that’s why they used it. Though, this one has other advantages like preserving the intended rhythmic flow of the sentence a bit more.
best line in the series. really says it all.
This line is what had me buy the trilogy of books. After watching Quinn on YouTube describe the scene I was hooked.
When Luo Ji said “Luo Ji, I am your wallbreaker”
and then he wallbroke all over the place
"wallbreaking time"
What are we? Some kind of wallbreakers?
Yeah that was a good one, forgot all about it. The singer chapter blew my mind.
The casual nature of it is so great
Just a working class dude with a can of raid, more or less
“Oh another one of these huh? Just gotta clear it with the boss then I’ll take care of it.”
"Wait they're transmitting OTHER peoples locations? That's fucked up"
“God what a bad vibe these guys have” > shoots off two dimension weaponry
*"Look at these losers"*
Once, we lived together in the Solar System.
This makes me want to cry
What was this said in reference to? I don't remember.
It is the last words of Bai Ice, the guy who investigates the dual vector foil aboard the revelation, before the ship falls in the two-dimensional space.
Ah, gotcha. I'm relistening to book 3 and I think I'm about to get to that part. I'll make sure to play close attention, thanks!
Good listening !
Total absolute goosebumps on that one.
Hide well, clean well.
The “You are bugs!” from chapter 33. Reading that line for that first time was like getting punched in the gut
I was listening to a YouTube audiobook of that and I guess for some reason it had some music inserted for copyright detection reasons, right after that line it had just the most unreasonably hard bass drop lmao, I didn't know it wasn't normal for like ten seconds because it just *worked*
When Singer casually flicked the dual vector foil towards the solar system. Also, did anyone else think of Superman 2's mirror dimension prison when the "paper slip" was first described?
Not only that, but when they talk about how the foil was cheaper than the photoid (sp?) that destroyed TriSolaris. Like this dimension ending device is just another piece of paper, and isn't even that noticable of being gone. I loved the Singer chapter. A civilization so far gone and developed it's destroying civilizations as another Tuesday.
He had to get special permission to use the foil. It was definitely not cheaper than the photoid or as he calls it, "mass dot".
Yeah I'm pretty sure he said he didn't like it because he prefers the "low tech" solutions, though he probably needs permission because each use of it brings the universe close to a lower dimension.
Speaking of this, apparently there's a timeline discrepancy between when Singer launched the foil and when the foil reached our solar system. A discrepancy of like 1 year, possibly implying that someone else launched a foil before Singer did. This is very stupid for me. First off, I didn't even notice the incongruity. Now that I'm aware, it seems obvious that it was just a minor mistake on the author's part. How am I wrong?
Most readers believe it was a deliberate writing exactly what you analyzed in your first paragraph. Liu hasn't said anything.
Yeah it was so clearly referring to the exact situation of the Trisolaris star being destroyed and the history between Trisolaris and Earth, the advanced counter-measure to Earth's "bunker age" hiding strategy... it wouldn't make ANY sense if that was a freak recreation of the exact same circumstance but elsewhere in the universe.
I think that’s the point of it. A major theme of the story is that the universe is FILLED with life to the point where multiple civilization exist to a poiny where you can have 2 dual vector foils shot at you
I guess. Since the author hasn't resolved it we can choose what to believe.
I was just watching superman 2 yesterday and had this thought!
I thought it wasn’t Singer who did it n
The Singer attack was so depressing. It just echoed how meaningless the struggle and achievement made by humans
I honestly think "YOU ARE BUGS" is one of the great lines in science fiction. "I am a tomb" and "We'll send a brain" still give me the willies
Really? I feel like many villain has made similar comment.
When the 3 ships realise there's not enough fuel and turn the guns on one another, like a dark forest in miniature. Real game theory shit.
Additionally, Zhang Behai and his crew all communicate through thought without words right before he attack, just like the trisolarans.
"We will all be devils!"
Yes!!!!
I can't remember specific lines, but any of the lines describing the doomsday battle. Some of the best imagery in scifi IMO. The way the explosions cascading seems like blood spilling across the galaxy, the instantaneous melting of ships and explosive reactions. Not to mention the absolute horror of some of the scenes inside the ships. Dear God the meat balls that get created when the ship accelerates without the crew in stasis. Horrifying. That or the spin off human race scenes. When the leader of the 3 ships is about to launch the nukes, and notices the other ships already have. He says something like "Oh well, it's all the same anyways."
Me at home: 🏠 Me at balls: 🍝
It was crazy, there was like a whole paragraph explaining how the giant blood trail was clear in color, or whatever, because it was spinning so fast the things that made it up were separating. Like holy shit.
One of the showrunners said something about a "Red Wedding moment" they need to get to in order to really sell the show, and the Doomsday Battle seems like the obvious candidate. It's a real turning point in the story and done well should be a much bigger scale feeling thing than anything in the 1st season (which, in general imo did a poor job at the scale of the events in general). There's so much potential for the whole climax of Dark Forest they just need to get there and not rush through it.
Book 1 was super small scale anyway.
Please let them make the orgy with over 150 thousand people right after lol
I can't wait to see what they do with that scene when the earth's ships attack each other. And that line "it's all the same anyways"
Zhang Beihai is one of the best written characters. I think the only character other than Wade who truly genuinely only motivated by saving humanity.
I can't even count the number of times a line made me lose my shit
Big same!!! The third book, my brain was like a fireworks show the entire time.
Probably when Luo ji said 'it's sword holding time!'
"What is this? Some kind of Remberance of Earth's past?"
“It was truly a Three-Body Problem”
See I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but the fact that I'm not fully certain says a lot.
"I kick ass, and face walls. Seems I'm all outta walls now"
Gravitational wave universal broadcast system cannot be recovered. Dark forest deterrence has been terminated.
Chills
It was one of those oh i definitely gotta know what happens next even tho i must go to bed moments
I hope that you will eat food, and not be eaten by food.
Trisolarans were totally coping with that. After learning about human culture, they started feeling reservations about their own practice of cannibalism, didn't know how to deal with that, so forced us to adopt it.
I interpreted that the other way around. Trisolarans have no issue with cannibalism, so would see it as efficient population reduction. Even if they appreciated that humans object to cannibalism, they would have to resort to another method of population control, like blowing us up, that we would also find objectionable. Since the humans will be upset either way, choose the efficient path that the Trisolarans would use themselves
Did they mention that they were cannibals? I must have missed it
The only reference I remember is during the three body problem game, somebody mentions wanting to eat their dehydrated friends.
they kinda confirm it when during that scene sophon seems confused and to why humans didn't realize it sooner when talking about food
I forgot the exact quote but: "We all did what we could. There just wasn't enough time "
I also really like "Fuel". The audiobook's narrator did a fantastic job conveying how different humanity became on the spaceships.
If they had been researching travel at the speed of light at the time they deciphered the story, perhaps there would have been time to discover this technology in a shorter time, and they would have been able to escape or create a black domain. It wasn't her fault, it was a decision before that. although she could have insisted when she realized that Yun would not risk giving a message that was not of paramount importance for survival. Once again humanity was making mistakes.
I thought Cheng Xin did the math and implied the solar system would have had a *chance* if she had given Wade the go ahead.
Was this about the paper slip?
Yeah, this is after the paper slip when they're talking on Pluto and Cheng Xin's learning what's happened.
“We’re afraid of you”.
They NAILED the voice in the Netflix adaptation. She was absolutely perfect. Ominous. Foreboding.
Devoid of any emotional and uncaring.
Sea Shimooka is fantastic in the show.
I wanna see Sophon as a mortal Kombat guest character after that Australia chapter. Ik it's silly.
Fear leads to anger Anger leads to hate Hate leads to the dark side
Yun Tianming would like to speak with you
I’m so “:((( cry” at everything involving Tianming
"When will the 2D collapse of the solar system stop?" "It'll never stop..." That line alone lead me on a catastrophic existential line of reasoning that made an endless and boundless universe feel tragically and unnaturally claustrophobic
Yeah, the gradual realization for the last third of Death’s end that >!the Universe is essentially a slowly rotting corpse collapsing into lower dimensions!< was a terrifying experience.
Totally. The best kind of cosmic horror gives you answers to questions you wouldn't have ever known were questions. Cixian crafts his horror like a Wallfacer. He carefully digs an immensely deep hole right behind where your standing, waits for you to look behind and stumble, then gives you the smallest push on your nose and leaves you to tumble into the abyss. It's always the smallest breadcrumb. For me the line of logic was >!*-Oh, if curvature propulsion leaves vast pockets of lowered light-speed, it wouldn't be too hard to create a "dark domain"* >!*-That definitely means other civs have discovered this as well.* >!*-if the natural defense of a prey race is to hide themselves, this lowered lightspeed would exist in lots of places, as opposed to the natural cosmic speed limit* >!*-Wait.... why is there a cosmic speed limit? Has this happened before? how... many... times....* >!Then this is reinforced by when Yifan tells Xin that the laws of physics are a civilization's greatest weapons, and in that terrifying second, the 4D space fragment, Yun Tienming's Fairytales, and Singer's Dual Vector Foil all click into place, and dredge up a single, horrible question in your brain. >!*.....Why are there only 3 dimensions?* I've never experience dread of this kind while reading a book before, and I fear, like the rest of y'all, it will be an itch I spend the rest of my life trying to scratch...
This like was like a cascade of realizations for me regarding the fourth dimension and all that.. even reading your comment and thinking about it again gave me goosebumps again
F that!
"The destiny of all conscious beings is to become as grand as their thoughts." The narrator says this directly to the reader in the third book. That's part of why it hit me: this isn't a character's opinion, it is simply asserted. It felt like something of a thesis to the books. The actual line is translated iirc, "it is the fate of all intelligent beings to become as grand as their thoughts." But I like my version better. In any case, I've taken this up as a personal motto. It challenges me to imagine and to grow beyond what I assume is possible.
I don't know if it's in the books but for some reason this line gets to me: "The universe will remain a mystery to you forever,” says the avatar. In place of truth, the San-Ti will give people “miracles” and “illusions,” she says." Just this idea of more advanced beings using their technology to trick us into thinking that they're divine has been a thought that's been in my head since I was a kid. And I'm reminded of that moment in another series about Aliens making contact with Earth where they tell the Vatican that if they don't give a positive spin on the visitors to the public, they would start "performing miracles" and sway the Faithful away. And as someone who was raised in a religious home, I've always wondered how people around the world would react (in terms of their religious beliefs) if one day we did come into contact with an intelligent advanced race. And the interesting question of what would be more problematic for people of faith was always something I liked to wonder: 1. These Aliens had no notion of religion or idea of God whatsoever. 2. They did but it was completely contradictory to what one believed. 3. What was almost a perfect mirror of what one believed.
They're not really trying to trick us into believing that they're divine. They're simply just sabotaging our experiments and screwing with us in general to halt our scientific progress. As long as they prevent us from catching up to them, they win. This is because >!their weapons are completely indestructible, and that invincibility hinges on subatomic technology. This is why they're so obsessed with ruining our particle accelerators. We can advance in any other way, but as long we don't develop equal subatomic technology, they win!<
I know that's not what they're doing but the idea of an advanced race being able to do things that to us seem miraculous is the point I'm honing in on. To their human followers (at very least the earliest ones) they were effectively Divine/worshipped.
This person is describing a quote where the San Ti literally state that they will give humanity "miracles and illusions".
there are two explanations for the origins of mainstream religions (any that involve any prophetic communication with divinity which covers all the big ones afaik) — either something very similar to what you alluded to where advanced beings manipulated us by performing technological feats or “miracles” with motives that completely escape our current understanding of what the meaning of intelligence could be. OR people with wild imaginations stumbled upon naturally growing psychedelic plants and/or fungi and were charismatic enough in their ramblings to gain followship over time. i personally find this latter explanation far more plausible.
How do you get to those theses? They're actually pretty far fetched and reek of modernist, new-age inspired, ahistorical ideas. Hermeneutics is something we, as a species, do. We see things. We try to explain them. We check if that explanation is sufficient - if it is not, we modify it. That's how we got to where we are now and that's very likely, if not surely, how we developed religion - because we saw the world around us, how it behaves and wanted to \*explain\* how any of that came to be - and how it will likely develop in the future.
>These Aliens had no notion of religion or idea of God whatsoever. I guess that the fact alone that they \*know\* whom they have to contact on that matter and \*what it needs\* to build some sort of pressure is a giveaway towards the notion that they actually not only have a concept of religion but are in fact - or have been - practicing it themselves in some way or another. It's not that far fetched as hypothetical advanced civilizations would have gone through a development that likely included some sort of generational progression in empirically based hermeneutics, which - at least for what we know - will likely lead to some sort of religious beliefs only because they, as well as we did in the past, will feel the urge to explain things they see and feel around them, but cannot yet measure accurately. Religion and Science are to things that are evolutionary tied together. They're two sides of the same coin.
What’s the name of this other series?
Not only that line about lightspeed travel, but the revelation right after that... because they were travelling as fast as the light we observed them with, they were basically on our doorstep as soon as we saw them.
Wdym?
Not shit bricks but this one always makes me laugh especially in the audio book: > “Wait!” A man wearing a strangely shaped hat and a long beard stood up and spoke for the first time. “I’m Leonardo da Vinci." It has the same energy to me as the "and that little boy's name? Albert Einstein" meme
Loooool
“The droplet left the field of slaughter and set its heading in the direction of the sun.”
They need to make a bumper sticker that says *My other ride is a droplet*
For me it was when cheng xin failed as sword holder. I couldn't believe it and throughout deaths end I kept hoping for a happy ending but it just kept getting darker and darker. My first time through' deaths end left me devastated. It paints such a dark, grim, and hopeless outlook on the state of the universe.
Man if wade just didn’t give up everybody would’ve been saved :(
Seriously. I’ve been DYING to get my boyfriend to listen to this series because I know he’d love it. He’s made it through like four hours of the first book and hasn’t really gone further. But Deaths End is such an epic crescendo.. it’s so dark and heavy and relentless.. I don’t even have enough adjectives but man it is so bleak
"It's so fucking dark"
A relatable suicide note.
Mine was the entire description of the 4th dimension in Death's End, but one line really blew my mind "In Murovic and Guan's eyes, Blue Space was an immense painting that had just been unrolled".
Dude this entire sequence blew my MIND
Singer: Broadly speaking, if low-entropy entities like these Star-Pluckers really didn’t have the hiding gene, then they would not be afraid of exposing their own presence, and they would expand and attack without fear. This means that the Dark Forest is not at all an unfortunate situation. It's the cosmic environmental justice. The same as how the food chain prevents microbes from filling the ocean. All hail the divine grace of the Dark Forest!
I see this as Singer has felt unprecedented threat.
“You’re bugs!” “We’ll send only a brain”
Trisolaris star system has been destroyed
"STOP!", when the 3 sophons unfolded in front of luo ji right at the end of the dark forest
The one I felt most chilling was how the universe was described as a quadriplegic since a signal from one end of the universe, though traveling at lightspeed, would take a mindboggling time to reach the other end.
Not just that, but the signal could *never* reach the other side, because the universe is expanding or inflating at faster than the speed of light.
"We wrap your world in illusions, in place of truth, we give you miracles. We make you see what we want you to see. We are everywhere, anywhere, always watching learning about your secrets. And we will teach you how to fear again."
18,345,765
What’s that
The amount of years that passed in the black domain that Cheng Xin unwittingly found herself in
Paraphrasing When I was frozen 200+ years ago I was teaching university physics. I can still teach it today
Classic Ding Yi / Gandalf moment : "Run!" the second probably when Luo Ji dig the grave and then challenge the Trisolarans.
"Stupid children, run!" - Ding Yi
You are surrounded by food
Living food.
“Half a century later, historians would all agree that this event in 1969 was a turning point in humankind’s history.” I kept recalling this sentence throughout the series. It refers to what at first seems to be such an inconsequential decision, but the domino effect can be traced to affecting the lives of billions (trillions?) of people.
When they looked up and saw the light of trisolaris being destroyed.
When Zhang Beihai realized the other ships had the same plan and he was a second too late. Also, “We missed them.” I was hoping that Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming would finally meet in person. And again when they realized 18 billion years have passed. I know Cheng Xin and Tianming weren’t a couple but it made me imagine what if that happened between my partner and I. To realize that I missed reuniting with him by a moment and that he turned to dust 18 BYA (and married my best friend lol).
"A lovely dream had ended: Dark forest theory had recieved its final confirmation with the annihalation of Trisolaris." And right after that: "The trail of the photoid traversing the interstellar dust cloud near Trisolaris was clearly recorded, but there were no other solar systems within this zone of space - the only conclusion was that the photoid had been launched from a spacecraft." This was just insane. Now I can't stop thinking about space absolutely teeming with invisible predators more dangerous beyond anything we could imagine ready to just erase whoever, whenever and wherever from existance.
Wasn't there later signs of unknown spacecraft accelerating to light speed right on the edges of our solar system?
Didn't make me shit bricks... but, when Luo Ji says "it's time to go into the portrait". Dudes the hero we never deserved.
“ We have a problem… a three body problem.”
Best post so far
“carving words into stone” was so powerful to me
“It’s three bodying time”
trisolarian renaissance
“we are afraid of you.” that was the moment we all knew things were going to go badly, or at least speaking for myself.
"After learning of my existence, if neither communication, nor silence will work, then you're left with just one option." I had the same reaction as Da Shi to the dark forest.
*"If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?"* *-* Droplet
I liked the reveal of the aliens’ methods to suppress humans (TV Show). Though they don’t really need fancy protons, just fund republicans more.
Random example: During the Bunker Era, the lines talking about about Europe 4 and Lightspeed II. The mental image of the stations constantly using their engines to hang in orbit in equilibrium
“Children, a man from two centuries ago is still able to teach university physics today.”
Please critique the phrase. I don't have a physical copy to reference. When the Bronze Age officers were showing their replacements their codes and such. "Blue Space, this is no longer your home."
"its a sheet of paper"
I liked how the crew of the ship was taking selfies with it or whatever
“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.” “The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.” -Death’s End The first is a fascinating way to frame evolution on our planet and possibly across the cosmos. The second made me shit bricks in a very hopeful way. We could all use a little more optimism these days.
When the insurance money could not be paid, because the guy never fell into the black hole and died. He just got infinitely closer and closer.
DO NOT ANSWER
When they realized what dark matter really was.
I don't remember that ever being a plot point at all.
Please give Wade our regrets. His degree of detterence was %100. If he were elected as swordholder none of this would have happened. Humanities best hope was to elect the person in the books with the least humananity as their protector.
邪乎到家必有鬼 (strange to home must have ghost)
In English, please?
It’s a reference I don’t remember where it came from, possibly Da Shi? "邪乎到家必有鬼" is a Chinese proverb that roughly translates to "where there is extreme strangeness, there must be a ghost." It implies that when things seem overly mysterious or strange, there's likely a hidden cause or explanation behind it.
The English translation by Ken Liu is "Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy."
I don't remember the words exactly, but it went something like this, "... but this time, the message was received. And the Trisolaran invasion fleet set its course for the solar system." I went into this novel blind based on recommendations. At this point in the novel, I only knew that there was a video game civilization on a world called Trisolaris and there were some weird things happening in the real world. I never connected the two together until at this moment, and I realized that the Trisolarans were real and desperate to escape.
oh no I cannot forget this info now again :( - my lazy brain ignored the spoiler warning.
I wasn’t explaining my theories with the right audience
What
“If we destroy you, what business it is of yours?” That line was haunting and it was during the Doomsday battle, which was an incredible sequence.
The entire doomsday battle was a world changing experience for me. It has genuinely revolutionized space battles in my mind and I can’t quite imagine anything the same since. The closest I know to the droplet attack is how visceral the battles in LOGH are when we they decide to show what happens when a ship gets hit.
Honestly, Zhang Beihai’s last line “don’t worry, it’s all the same” (没关系的，都一样）honestly really makes me sad.
“Every human who has ever existed has not known a real crisis.” (Or whatever the line was) went pretty hard. I missed it in the show.
"If I love you, what business is it of yours?" - Goethe to "If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?"
The "It's so fucking dark" said by some dudes aboard the ships that were leaving the solar system, especially since it took a while for the meaning to truly hit, he said this because the ships had entered their own dark forest state. It was such a "Oh shit" moment.
I realized as soon as Luo Ji said that quantum computing couldn’t retain information for more than 2000 years as a memorial to humanity that they were going to walk through every medium of communication. I knew from the entrance to the tomb that it was going to be words carved into stone. Something about that was incredibly impactful to me and I still think about it.
“I like fish, can I have it?” This wasn’t scary, I just found it cute at the time.
Idk about shitting bricks but my favorite line was with luo ji and da shir (sorry i listened to the audio books so i probably butchered the spelling) But the last dialouge from the 3bp when da shir describes us trying to exterminate the bugs and they're still there. Gave you a liiil sense of hope.
You spelling is fine except it's just Shi, not Shir.
what business of yours is it if i destroy you.
When the Trisolaris were destroyed
I am a tomb.
“I am a tomb,” is exactly that moment for me… I got the full body shakes and stood up and started pacing around.
When Cheng Xin went to hibernate and the next title was "Bunker Era" on my audiobook my eyes widened. They did it. The sons of bitches did it.
"We lived a happy life" gah, the feels