I don’t think this piece by Tony Milligan in The Conversation regarding Fermi’s paradox, Cixin Liu’s 3 Body Problem, and the universe being a dark forest where everyone hides, is quite right.

I have no difficulty with people finding problems with the book. I did not enjoy it, and so did not go on to read the following two. Life is short, and I have a large number of books that might not be very good but which I would like to re-read, so I have no wish to continue any series where I did not like the first book. @philbc3 articulated this far better than I could right here, so feel free to read and come back. But yes it read like very old fashioned SF to me, with flat characters and language and dealing with themes I have read many times before.

I “enjoyed” the narrative regarding the horrors of the cultural revolution & found myself remembering The Day Lasts More than A Hundred Years by Chinghiz Aitmatov which dealt among other things with those living in the aftermath of Stalin’s purges & in which the SF element was also not very good.

In terms of we are aliens and we want to destroy you because we destroy everything and are not concerned about your women or resources, I preferred the very bleak Forge of God by Greg Bear (and its differently bleak and still murderous sequel Anvil of Stars). That would have been a much better film than Independence Day.

I agre with Milligan that any lions and tigers and bears that might be out there are not predators resulting from the arms race of Darwinian evolution. But that is not a reason to write off such concerns (or even dismiss it as a SF trope). Given this is a slice of the SF genre oft given over to self replicating von Neumann machines, there is another part of von Neumann’s work we should consider, ie Game Theory. With players of unknown strength and battles of uncertain outcome, is there not some optimum strategy that calls for the destruction of everyone else asap, if a player has the means?

And as for us having “absolutely no evidence about alien behaviour, or about competition within or between other civilisations”, the parallel that Stephen Hawking & others raised in their caution about contact with ET comes in part from our experience with European colonisation.

Aitmatov’s book was certainly from the Soviet Era, & in it everyone agreed to do everything to keep the aliens as far as possible away from us. The Strugatsky brothers would have probably given a warning or two as well. I’d mention Stanislaw Lem, but his rolling in his grave might destroy the world if I suggested in any way he was a Soviet writer.