Would you consider the characters of The Three Body Problem to be all that interesting? Yet it's widely considered to be a great novel. Not sure whether The Dark Forest or the third book do a better job with characters, but the plot and the ideas make the story.

> The Dark Forest

This is a tangent, but have you found any other books you can recommend for someone having a hard time finding sci fi books they like while absolute adoring The Three-body Problem trilogy / Remembrance of Earth's Past?

Whenever I hear about putting beacons in space I'm always reminded of the plot of the book The Dark Forest. I remember too about a decade ago that it was decided the idea of broadcasting our location in deep space might be a bad idea.

The Dark Forest is the sequel to the Three Body Problem which is part of the trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Path

> This particular proposed resolution to Fermi’s Paradox question is a very recent addition. It takes its name from the novel The Dark Forest

The same idea was in Gregory Benford's novel In the Ocean of Night in the 1970s.

The Dark Forest is book 2 of Three Body Trilogy

I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, which explore the concept of aliens using their super advanced technology to mess with the results of Earth's particle accelerators, thereby stopping humanity's ability to develop technology based on new physics.

Is this discovery exciting? Or are we living in The Three-Body Problem?

The Dark Forest, the second book of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy (Three Body Problem) goes into a good bit of exploration of the ramifications of space observation, communication and espionage in combination with relativistic distances starting out with roughly current human technology.

Spoilers for The Dark Forest and The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy below.

In the book that the OP article is based on, humanity is doing anything and everything to prevent/defend themselves against an alien invasion happening ~400 years in the future. The character who coins "Dark Forest" theory in the book proposes sending a 'spell' (just a signal containing coordinates) to a nearby star, which is then amplified throughout the universe via "Sci-Fi science". This reveals the location of the star, and shortly after the star is destroyed by some comet-sized object moving at the speed of light. It's later revealed that some other civilization listens for broadcasts on every spectrum, decodes them for coordinates, then destroys the ones that seem to have actually been sent by intelligent life.

I thought this made perfect sense - why wouldn't another intelligent species do this if they possess the technology? I personally agree with "Dark Forest" theory and think that we should /never/ make first contact (lest we are destroyed), but if we were to attempt first contact, we should at the very least have a weapon like you described available to us first.

The title reminds me of the sci-fi book The Dark Forest, whose premise is that the galaxy is full of life that stays silent for fear of being annihilated. In retrospect, not a whole lot different from an actual forest.

I sometimes subscribe to the spiritual view of the author, that space (in this case a forest) is part of a larger intelligence that communicates with us. It's not something I bring up a lot, for fear of sounding unhinged, but it lines up with my experiences.