The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin: Some criticism with spoilers

In my last post about the book, I talked mostly about why I liked the book and hinted at some issues as well. Here, I will go a bit deeper into the aspects that I didn't like in the book. 

Women characters

I usually don't focus too much on character writing in science fiction because I haven't read good examples in the genre so far, so I just accept the fact the plot is more important than the characters in this genre, but, approaching the 2010's, you'd expect a bit of improvement from some of the science fiction classics regarding women.

But, apparently, Liu Cixin didn't even try to write good female characters. The characters' writing feels so anachronistic in this day and age. I don't know much about Chinese culture and how they see women, but I guess the treatment women receive in the novel has to do with that.

Just 2 examples to remonstrate with this point: Luo's spouse exists merely as an object, plain, one-dimensional, unrealistic, infantilized, with no goals of her own (besides visiting the Louvre?), and with no real place in the book, whose job is to fall in love with Luo for no reason at all, and give him a daughter; then she disappears in the novel almost completely. Was she paid to do all of this? Did she do it voluntarily? 

The spouse of the wallfacer Haines is only mentioned in the book as the one who betrayed him and that was it! She was clearly brilliant and capable, she was smart and more interesting than Haines, but the author almost always mentions her alongside her husband, as if she didn't have a life, goal, desires, personality of her own. And, she was a wallbreaker, for god's sake! And then she kills herself because she couldn't deal with her betrayal! Absurd. The wallbreakers were determined, dogged, with a clear sense of the mission, and full of conviction. 

The mediocre points of the plot

* The space battle. It focused solely on the probe, and I couldn't get a sense of what was going on with the hundreds of thousands of people in the ships. Sure, Liu mentioned some captains and some technicians, but that was it. I think this space "battle" was a key point in the whole book because of its significance, but we got more pages on wallfacer Luo and his days at the mountains and his search for his perfect girlfriend! I didn't like this imbalance at all. 

* Women, again. What's with Luo's girlfriends, the writer and then the imaginary one, and then the imaginary-real one? How did this advance the plot? Perhaps I just missed it, but nonetheless, it was humdrum at best and sickening at worse. 

* Space battles. I couldn't understand why the space fight would resemble naval forces and not the air forces. I just simply don't get it. 

Ending

Weak ending. Basically, it was the same trick 2 previous wallfacers used, only that this time the sophons weren't watching. Maybe this will be clarified a bit in the third book. 

Plot holes and unresolved things (Perhaps to be resolved in the third book):

* Why did the Trisolarans stop trying to kill Luo? Why didn't they notice anything beyond the ordinary with his latest actions? Why didn't they assign a human wallbreaker to him? Why didn't the probe just kill him, being so close to him at the end? (I know, the probe was running out of "energy", but this is unbelievable, taking into account all of what the probe did to the ships) Why didn't they follow up on the "cursed" star destruction? 

* Why did the humans think that human technology progress was sufficient to defeat the Trisolarans at the end of the book? Physics was blocked and technology computing capacity was also halted. The book emphasizes the 15% of light-speed velocity capacity of the human space vessels and apparently, that was all humanity needed. Trisolarans had sophons at the very beginning, and they were capable of interstellar travel 200 years ago, but humanity didn't achieve anything similar and clearly didn't advance enough, beyond some cool technology tricks and ubiquitous internet access. This was a low point for me in the book. 

* What happened with the imprinted and the 4 remaining mental seal devices? I'm sure this will be dealt with in the third book, so this point doesn't worry me.