Interesting, why do you think the Dark Forest idea falls apart?

Dear God, it is egregious, and somehow gets worse as the series goes on. It's hard to talk about a lot of it without getting into serious spoilers, but Jesus Christ the stuff in book three especially is insanely bad. And I didn't even think it could get worse after the shit with Luo Ji in book two.

"The world is doomed because of FEMINIZATION"

Okay buddy.

Maybe it was just an Asimov homage?

::: SPOILER SPOILER The wallbreaker stuff is awful, and it gets even worse when you realise that absolutely nothing about Luo Ji's plan benefits from secrecy. Like, all the other wallbreakers are actually doing something that involves trying to deceive Trisolaris, but Luo Ji's idea actually gets more powerful the more people know about it. Ninety percent of the conflict in Dark Forest is solved if he just publicly announces his theory the moment he comes up with it. In fact there's actually a simpler and faster way for him to test his theory than using his Spell, and it prevents the invasion from ever happening, which is just to assume its true and announce his demands. If Trisolaris buys into the hypothesis, they back down, and if they don't then it doesn't actually matter if its true or not. :::

Now you know what reading/watching American SF feels like to non-Americans. You're growing!

Asimov is at his best when writing short stories, where ideas can shine while character and plotting take a back seat. Long form was always his weakness. Sorry to everyone who loves Foundation but those books are absolute dog-ass. Full of brilliant ideas, but still dog-ass.

And there are plenty of writers who do good science with good fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Iain McDonald, and Kim Stanley Robinson just off the top of my head. I know there are plenty more.

i hate that people complain how he was not very good at writing people, so was Asimov.

I'm still waiting for my nuclear powered ashtray.

Just because something is (or pretends to be) hard sci-fi doesn't make it well written even if you ignore the major character flaws. The concepts the first book explores aren't even that amazing. This is one of the most over-hyped sci-fi books of all time.

i hate that people complain how he was not very good at writing people, so was Asimov.

Asimov was western and thus "one of us".

Liu Cixin is Chinese and thus "one of them".

This makes all the difference.

Also, knowing a bit of orbital mechanics really screws up the whole concept of the Trisolarans. There are so much easier solutions to their problem than staging an interstellar invasion.

For example, the only way you can have three stars orbiting each other without one being ejected is to have them arranged how the Alpha Centauri system is arranged. Here, two approximately Sun-mass stars orbit each other at about the same distance as Neptune orbits the Sun. Then there's a distant red dwarf that is a quarter of a lightyear out in a wide orbit, orbiting both of the larger stars in common. You can't have three stars orbiting each other all at a similar distance. One will inevitably get ejected or collide with the others very quickly.

It's entirely possible for planets to exist in such a system. We've found planets around at least one of the larger stars in Alpha Centauri. Now, if you have two Sun like stars orbiting much closer, like Earth-Sun distance, it wouldn't be possible to have a stable planet in the habitable zone of either star, or in a habitable orbit around both stars. So there are arrangements where no habitable planet can stably exist, either orbiting one or both.

But as you note, nothing could evolve on a planet that isn't reasonably stable over billions of years.

But even if you ignore that, there are so many better solutions to the Trisolan's problem that trying to invade Sol. For example, you can almost always find a stable orbit really close to just one of the larger stars. They could build large space habitats really close to one star, closer than the distance of Mercury. And then they can simply use solar shields and mirrors to keep those habitats at comfortable temperatures. And the same works in reverse. Have two large stars orbiting really close, closer than the orbit of Mercury? Maybe there isn't a stable orbit between them. Instead build artificial habitats distant from both of them, like at the orbital distance of Neptune. Then just rely on large mirror arrays to concentrate the dilute sunlight at that distance. Or hell, just skip the mirrors and use reactors to power your habitats.

The point is, by the time you become a real space-fairing species, capable of getting into space in a big way? The "habitable zone" around a star completely loses all meaning. If we had good access to space, here in our solar system, we could build orbital habitats anywhere from a fraction of Mercury's distance from the Sun to well outside the orbit of Pluto. You just need to use the right combination of mirrors to either diffuse or concentrate solar radiation towards or away from your habitats. If you have space flight, you don't need a stable planet in your system's habitable zone. You can just build entirely artificial habitats in whatever orbits your system does have that are reasonably stable. And they don't even have to be perfectly stable, as you can use those same mirrors as solar sails to correct for any slight gravitational perturbations. Doing this is absolutely orders of magnitude easier than trying an interstellar invasion. And in the Dark Forest context, it's a lot less likely to get your civilization noticed by some hungry predator species hiding in the dark. The engines of your giant space armada are likely to be visible at interstellar distances.