alt Hacker NewsI only read the first book of the trilogy and the "science" in it was so profoundly absurd that I couldn't motivate myself to read any further. I think part of the issue is that it had been sold to me under the guise that it was hard sci-fi, and it was anything but.
I disagree it's unoriginal, though. It's pretty original, you just have to be prepared to suspend your disbelief (it's kind of on me that I wasn't when I read it).
Is it? Maybe I didn't get far enough into the series, but the parts I did read and the synopsis online are all derivative of old ideas. The "dark forest" idea is a very old and much debated solution to the Fermi paradox, and appears in other works (e.g. the wolves in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series). The VR stuff was derivative of dozens of previous works. The rehydration of the solarians is not that different than the spiders freezing in A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge. Plenty of alien invasion and doom cult literature out there (too much, in my opinion).
But I took Dark Forest to mean the Dark Forest Theory which the post I was replying to mentioned, and that's just a common theory under a new name, which has been a commonly known solution to the Fermi paradox for so long that no one is credited with coming up with it. It's given the "deadly probe" name in a SETI review of the Fermi paradox literature in 1984.