So I finally finished the third book of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and it really took some effort as it is far longer than the previous two books. This is a true epic in every sense of the word, with a prelude that takes place before the previous two novels, covers events in parallel with them, and then picks up after them until what amounts to the heat death of the universe. It’s by far my favorite of the three books and lays out some genuinely terrific ideas.
The parallel part is that it is revealed that even while Earth was working on the Wallfacer program, another group was tasked with sending a probe to the approaching Trisolaran fleet. A female scientist Cheng Xin comes up with a plan to launch a probe using a staggered series of nuclear explosions to accelerate it to a useful velocity. However the payload is tiny and in the end they can only send the extracted brain of a single human volunteer in the hopes that the Trisolarans will see fit to resurrect him in a body and he can somehow return actionable intelligence to humanity. The volunteer is Yun Tianming who has been in love with Cheng Xin ever since they were classmates in school. After the launch, Cheng Xin is put into what would be only the first of a series of hibernations as the novels jumps ahead decades and even hundreds of years at a time. Following the establishment of the successful deterrence strategy formulated by Luo Ji, Cheng Xin is awakened to become to next Swordholder, given the authority to initiate the transmission that would broadcast the location of Trisolaris to the galaxy at large and therefore doom both worlds in the event of renewed hostilities between Trisolaris and Earth.
The above plot summary captures only a tiny, tiny fraction of what happens in the book. The sheer scope of the story is mind-boggling and the book even includes a fantasy-themed story within a story as Yun Tianming attempts to pass on valuable information to Earth hidden in the form of fairy tales. There’s no faulting Liu’s ambition or imagination here. I’ve accused him of lacking any truly original ideas before but I think by doubling down on Dark Forest theory where every civilization is constantly on the lookout for any other emerging civilization in order to exterminate them before they can become a threat, and working out various strategies within that context such as a way to broadcast to the universe that your civilization is no threat to anyone, he is truly breaking new ground. The downside is that he is only able to cover so much ground by packing in tons and tons of exposition. This book constantly breaks the show, don’t tell rule by summarizing what happens to human society over long periods of time when the main point of view character Cheng Xin is inactive. It gets away with this because the events truly are fascinating and you want to know what happens next but it’s hard to call this great literature.
One downside is that Liu continues to treat his female characters cruelly. I was delighted to discover that the protagonist this time around is a woman yet sorely disappointed when I realized that the author never meant to make Cheng Xin any kind of heroic figure. Instead she is mostly a passive figure from whose eyes the reader witnesses momentous events while the others around her, almost all men, are the ones actually getting things done. Not once, but twice over the course, she loses her nerve dooming humanity. Yet she is never blamed by everyone else for it because she did it out of kindness and love and the mistake really belongs to all of humanity for putting her in that position to make the key decisions. It really says something about what Liu sees women as: objects of veneration who embody the qualities of love, mercy and kindness but are never expected to do anything themselves. Contrast this with the character of Luo Ji, the protagonist of the previous book. He returns to play a major role in here as well and is elevated to a near God-like status, being the only human that the Trisolarans respect. It’s positively infuriating.
From a Western perspective, what is most fascinating about this trilogy as a whole is how it is based on fundamentally different values than what we’re used to. As interviews with Liu has made clear, he is disdainful of democracy or that there is any wisdom to be found in the masses. In this story, we continually see how humanity as a whole keep making awful decisions if left to their own devices. Solutions to crises emerge only from great men, and they are always men, who step up to take action unilaterally even when society as a whole hates them for it. Liu also does not appear to believe that genuine cooperation is possible between different civilizations. Even after the passage of billions of years, the various surviving starfaring civilizations still appear to retain their respective identities and cultural legacies rather than be assimilated into a broader agglomeration. No United Federation of Planets for you here. It really is quite striking how dark and pessimistic his worldview is, especially given what he reveals the final fate of the universe to be due to the interstellar wars.
Finally though the trilogy is complete this is not quite the end. Despite the high page count, Liu manages to cover so much ground only by having many critical events take place off screen such as Yun Tianming’s story or how the Luo Ji that we see in this novel came to be this way. Apparently some of these questions are answered in another novel The Redemption of Time by another writer that started life as a piece of fanfiction but has since been officially acknowledged as a sequel and even translated into English by Ken Liu. I’m sure I’ll pick it up some time down the road. As for this novel, I have plenty of complaints about some apparent plot holes and the pointlessness of some scenes, but I do agree that Liu is a masterful storyteller and this trilogy is required reading for any serious science-fiction fan.