Death's End - The Dark Forest Attack on the Solar System

Towards the end of Cixin Liu's Death's End, someone in a planet far, far, away sees that the Trisolarian system was destroyed, and works out that our Solar system probably did it. This person is about as low in the organisation as anyone can get without actually being a cleaner. He goes to his boss to ask for the relevant weapon, and having been authorised, flips it carelessly in the direction of our Sun. It's a small two-dimensional thing, and is observed with curiosity as it makes its way towards us. Then it is activated, and... squish squash squwash... the space around it loses the third dimension. Everything is crushed down to two dimensions and destroyed in the process. The effect expands outwards at light speed, and nothing can stop it. We now understand the episode where our heroes encountered a four-dimensional world that seemed to be shrinking to three-dimensions. Our solar system, and in fact ultimately the whole universe, is going to be rendered two-dimensional. Which, as one of the characters says, is only not a problem for the aggressor, if they are actually two-dimensional in the first place.

This kept coming back to me. Such Dark Forest attacks, we have earlier had suggested, would only happen when the cost and risks of doing so were minimal and did not give away the attackers location away. Which is exactly what happens. The casual destruction by a lowly employee. The fact that destroying a solar system and then a galaxy is not something anyone needs to debate or get clearance for. The sheer off-handedness of it all.

Before you worry, the physics of the device - along with most of the physics in the series - is utter nonsense, but we go along with it because the story it enables is so interesting.

After a week of this sticking in my mind (I really am not that preceptive) I got what Cixin was up to. It's an analogy with the legal bureaucracy. Where public employees can reach out and destroy careers, marriages, and lives with a charge here, an investigation there, a court case, and the sentence, tossed as it were at the offender with a flip of the wrist. They only penalise what comes to their attention, investigate as little as possible, spend as little effort as possible running the process, and hand out the penalty with no thought for its effects or consequences.

I suspect it may be possible to read a lot of the book like that. In fact, there's a passage in it where he tells us that's what he's doing. But I'll leave that for you. And I could be reading far too much into it.