Excerpt from The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
This is an excerpt from the book The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin, translated from the Chinese by Joel Martinsen. The Dark Forest is the second book in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth’s Past, or commonly known as the The Three-Body Problem series.
I should note that I do not support this author, due to his problematic comments on the treatment of Uyghur peoples’ group by the Chinese government.
“It’s worse than I imagined,” Allen said to Rey Diaz. They were standing next to a black obelisk made of lava rock, the monument marking ground zero of humankind’s first atom bomb.
“Is its structure really that different?” Rey Diaz asked.
“Totally different from today’s nuclear bombs. Constructing its mathematical model might be more than a hundred times more complicated than today’s bombs. This is an enormous under-taking.”
“What do I need to do?”
“Cosmo’s on your staff, right? Get him to come to my lab.”
“William Cosmo?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s…he’s…”
“An astrophysicist. An authority on stars.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“That’s what I”m gonna tell you. To your mind, a nuclear bomb is detonated and then explodes, but the actual process is more like burning. The greater the yield, the longer the combustion. A twenty-megaton nuclear explosion, for example, has a fireball that can last for over twenty seconds. The superbomb we’re designing is two hundred megatons, and its fireball will burn for several minutes. Think about that. What will it look like?”
“A small sun.”
“Correct! Its fusion structure is very like that of a star, and it reproduces stellar evolution over a very abbreviated period. So the mathematical model we need to construct is essentially the model of a star.”
White sands stretched out in front of them. In the moments just before dawn, the details of the dark desert couldn’t be made out.. As they gazed at the scenery, they were involuntarily reminded of the basic setting of Three Body.
“I’m very excited, Mr. Rey Diaz. Please forgive me for our lack of enthusiasm at the start. Looking at the project now, the significance far exceeds the construction of a superbomb itself. DO you know what we’re doing? We’re creating a virtual star!”
Rey Diaz shook his head in disapproval. “What does that have to do with the defense of Earth?”
“Don’t be limited by planetary defense. Me and my colleagues in the lab are scientists, after all. Besides this thing is not without practical significance. So long as you input the appropriate parameters, the star could be a model for our sun. Think about it. It’s always useful to have the sun in your computer memory. It’s the biggest presence that’s close to us in the cosmos, but we could take more advantage of it. The model may have many more discoveries lying in wait.”
Rey Diaz said, “One previous use of the sun is what brought humanity to the brink, and brought you and me to this place.”
“But new discoveries might bring humanity back. So today, I’ve invited you here to watch the sunrise.”
The rising sun was now just peeking its head over the horizon. The desert in front of them came into focus like a developing photograph, and Rey Diaz could see that this place, once blasted by the fires of hell, was now covered in sparse undergrowth.
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Allen exclaimed.
“What?” Rey Diaz whipped his head around, as if someone had shot him from behind.
“Oppenheimer said that when he watched the first nuclear explosion. I think it’s a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.”
The wheel in the east expanded rapidly, casting light across the Earth like a golden web. The same sun was there on that mourning when Ye Wenjie had tuned the Red Shore antenna, and even before that, the same sun had shone upon the dust settling after the first bomb blast. Australopithecus a million years ago and the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago had turned their dull eyes upon this very sun, and even earlier than that, the hazy light that penetrated the surface of the primeval ocean and was felt by the first living cell was emitted by this same sun.
Allen went on, “And then a man called Bainbridge followed up Oppenheimer’s statement with something completely nonpoetic: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’ “
“What are you talking about?” Rey Diaz said. Watching the rising sun, his breathing became ragged.
“I’m thanking you, Mr. Rey Diaz, because from now on we’re not sons of bitches.”
In the east, the sun rose in overarching solemnity, as if declaring to the world, “Everything is as fleeting as a shadow before me.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Dark Forest – Summary
This is the second novel in “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”, the near-future trilogy written by China’s multiple-award-winning science fiction author, Cixin Liu.
In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion — four centuries in the future. The aliens’ human collaborators 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 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.
Copyright © 2008 by Liu Cixin.
Translated from the Chinese by: Joel Martinsen
You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.
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