Recently I finished the trilogy starting with the Three-Body Problem, Remembrance of Earth’s Past. If you haven’t heard, it’s a science fiction series created by the Chinese author Liu Cixin. The book Three-Body Problem became especially famous outside China when president Obama said he liked it.
The book is quite an interesting form of space opera. The book starts somewhere in the 60s during the cultural revolution in China. Sort of incidentally someone sends a signal too a near by planet. The aliens there immediately plan an invasion with their interstellar fleet. Fortunately that’ll take another 350 years before the ships arrive to planet earth. Rest of the book plays in current time, where the international forces comes up with plans to counteract. The international forces are combined of mostly Chinese and Western forces, where China is an unquestionably superpower too.
I noticed most of the characters are describe as heavy smokers, but not to indicate some instability, it’s more a background.
In the book a process to deep-freeze/hibernate people is developed, allowing some of the characters to go into hibernation. That’s used in the second books, which s set in the near future but has some characters from the previous book who went into hibernation. Without revealing too much, needless to say the struggle of humanity in the ‘dark forest’ continuous. I enjoyed reading the second book too. Giving the timeline there a lot of characters, but to allow for continuity some of the characters are descended from previous characters – besides hibernation.
One theme that struck me is the problem of ‘mutual assured self destruction’, e.g. ‘MAD’. Do you need some madman at the trigger/red button of which your opponents can be sure he or she will trigger it?
Last book is pretty long and wraps up not only the story, but also the whole universe – slightly similar to other series I’ve read like The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton or the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds. After thousands of pages and quite a few books science fiction authors like to sort end their universe or the world they’ve created – maybe just to get the world out of their head too.