A great aacademic article that articulates clearly many of the reasons I don’t like Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest trilogy. The politics espoused in them is dehumanising garbage.
If you have trouble accessing the article please let me know.
I have been arguing that Liu’s novels, which precisely imagine the common enemy for humanity that Schmitt could not, show how the urge to accept violent conflict as the essence of political life quickly gives way to dehumanization and an absolute, unfettered destruction. Whereas the Holocaust may have finally moderated some of Schmitt’s faith in agonism, Liu adopted such historical violence as the motivating cause for his characters to embrace existential conflict. Ken Liu, the preeminent translator responsible for two volumes of the Remembrance trilogy, remarked in an interview that there were only “two historical events Liu Cixin could think of that would cause somebody to be so utterly disappointed by human nature that Ye’s willing to trust a higher power from outside to redeem humanity: The Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution” (Pandell)…
Liu’s choices in characterization would be shortcomings in a realist novel; for this science fiction trilogy, however, his sacrifice of deliberative planning and emotional appeal for raw decisions serves to discredit liberal values in favor of “totalitarian” order, an aesthetic politics defined—as it was for Schmitt—by a core belief in existential antagonism. Later in the narrative, officials interrogate a crew member from another vessel that had been isolated in space. He explains that, once their connection to Earth was severed, “I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived” (Death’s 113). In a striking passage, he compares this shift to the famous “Third Wave” experiment of 1967, in which a high school teacher from California showed that it took his students only five days to embrace authoritarian rule (114). When trapped in space, the crewman insists, “we formed a totalitarian state as well. Do you know how long it took? Five minutes” (114)…
Liu’s novels do not merely thematize authoritarian ideas; his aesthetic choices and cosmological premises serve to make this drift toward centralized political power appear necessary to characters and readers alike.
