I won't review the book, which I found a bit disappointing, but I wanted to share one excerpt. The novel is about "first contact" with an alien society, with emphasis on the "dark forest theory" that any civilization advanced enough to make contact is a priori a threat. In this book, the first of a trilogy, both earthlings and the aliens are preparing for an encounter with one another. Here is the initial alien strategy:
The princeps said, "What we must do next is contain the progress of science on Earth. Luckily, as soon as we received the first messages from Earth, we began to develop plans to do so. As of now, we've discovered a favorable condition for realizing these plans...What an outrageous concept - conquer the earth by steering earthlings away from the fundamental principles of science. How ridiculous - no advanced earth society would allow itself to be deluded in such a fashion....
Given a time gap of forty thousand hours, the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization's development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science... In addition to highlighting the negative effects of progress, we'll also attempt to use a series of 'miracles' to construct an illusory universe that cannot be explained by the logic of science... Then unscientific ways of thinking will dominate scientific thinking among human intellectuals, and lead to the collapse of the entire scientific system of thought..."
Wait a minute...
