[riku_iki]

genuinely curious what is not goofy in your experience. While books are not perfect, imo they are one of the best hard fiction books available. I think I enjoyed only several other books more in this genre: Blindsight for example.

[nathan_compton]

Pretty much everything about the premise seems silly to me.

A civilization that can unwrap protons and build machines that violate energy conservation inside of them wouldn't need to care about taking over other species as basically all the material and energy of any solar system, regardless of whether it had life in it or not, would be available to them. And if you could build such objects you could probably find a better way to destroy our enemies than fiddling with their particle accelerators.

The Dark Forest idea is also very dumb. The universe is so stupidly big that going out of your way to destroy other lifeforms, especially if you are a technologically advanced species, is a huge waste of resources for no gain whatsoever. Furthermore, even in a hostile universe there is much to be gained from alliances, especially for intelligent lifeforms for whom the idea of a "civilization" is not tightly coupled to a specific biological underpinning.

I'm not saying a book couldn't be written with these premises. Obviously fiction can go all sorts of places. I just found the presentation of these ideas highly implausible in this text.

[riku_iki]

> A civilization that can unwrap protons and build machines that violate energy conservation inside of them wouldn't need to care about taking over other species as basically all the material and energy of any solar system, regardless of whether it had life in it or not,

it is not obvious that such tech automatically gives large scale terraforming capabilities. Also, I think one of the book premises is that trisolars are stagnant civilization, they achieved some advancements in some areas, but couldn't make breakthroughs in any others. They restarted evolving fast after learning from human civilization.

> Furthermore, even in a hostile universe there is much to be gained from alliances, especially for intelligent lifeforms for whom the idea of a "civilization" is not tightly coupled to a specific biological underpinning.

Price of the risk is too high if contact with totally different species won't go well.