Comment by jaggederest
3 days ago
In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read.
I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered.
Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.
I thought I recognized that name: Nylund also wrote some books for the Halo series which I enjoyed, although I was already a fan of the games.
I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.
I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.
I haven't been able to find Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise" and sequel "A Signsl Shattered" in ebook format.
But they are strange and great.
Those two novels of Nylund's really captured the "dark forest" concept well, though I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers.
I haven't read the source material so I can't speak to the books, but the adaptations of 3 Body (Problem) that I've watched, both the Tencent and Netflix ones, also explore similar themes to Nylund's works. Heck, I just discovered that Liu Cixin coined the "dark forest" term, though he isn't the first to explore it.