To be fair it's a recurring space opera theme, nothing particularly new.

Dark forest being a trope in other books is irrelevant to it being a huge spoiler for the series when mentioned together which definitely will make the experience of reading it less enjoyable.

That's like saying murder is in a lot of books so it's not a big deal to spoil a book with a pivotal murder in its plot. Have you read the books? Because I would think the importance would be obvious if you had.

"The Dark Forest" is literally the title of one of the books, and they were published quite a few years ago.

I said posting the link, not mentioning the title. The "theory" is named after the book. The wikipedia article was added in October 2022 and is mostly just modeled after Cixin Liu's use of the theory. From one of the citations:

>This particular proposed resolution to Fermi’s Paradox question is a very recent addition. It takes its name from the novel The Dark Forest by famed Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

So the title of a book wasn't a spoiler for itself.

> The "theory" is named after the book

You know, that's what I previously thought, but the article says the hypothesis has been around in some form since the 80s, so I figured it wasn't a huge spoiler. The article directly contradicts your source quote (science fiction versions section).

I enjoyed that wikipedia link more than the novel