Back when I wrote about the final book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy I said I’ll probably pick up this semi-official companion book and now I have. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered. This started out as a piece of fanfiction by a devoted fan Baoshu and became popular enough that it was acknowledged by Liu Cixin and his publisher. But it remains firmly in fanfiction territory as it is nowhere as creative or as well written as the original trilogy. It is also largely a companion piece to Death’s End instead of the trilogy as a whole as it features the characters from the last book.

This book is very much all about Yun Tianming. On Planet Blue, Yun is stranded with AA and though they can see the starship carrying Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan, they know that as the ship is trapped in a zone of slow time, by the time it lands on the planet they will be long dead. As Yun and AA commit to become lovers even though AA suspects that he still loves Cheng Xin, Yun recounts his experiences first with the Trisolarans and later about a mysterious entity known as the Spirit of the Master after the destruction of both Trisolaris and Earth. He reveals that after he succeeded in gaining the trust of the Trisolarans, he has been observing events on Earth via the sophons. In this way, the book fills in gaps from the last book of the trilogy, revealing why Thomas Wade for example failed to assassinate Cheng Xin. AA too reveals secrets of her own and her own connection to Yun. But the conflict between Earth and the Trisolarans is a mere sideshow as Yun is recruited by the Spirit to hunt for an entity known as the Lurker who was originally responsible for collapsing the perfect 10-dimensional universe. To accomplish this, he is granted near god-like powers and immortality and discovers that this battle is even more epic than the Spirit thought.

As this synopsis suggests, this book reads exactly as if Baoshu finished reading Death’s End, identified entirely with Yun and decided to write a fanfiction in which everything goes right for his favorite character. Sure Yun gets tortured by the Trisolarans when he at first refuses to cooperate but due to his superior mental fortitude, he emerges stronger from the experience. The book goes out of its way to ensure that Yun can have his cake and eat it too. He gets to live a full, happy life on Planet Blue with AA as a couple but after that he becomes a god-like figure operating on a level far above anything else we’ve seen so far in the series. On top of that, we get a new characterization for AA to suggest that she might be the one that is destined for Yun all along instead of Cheng Xin. What’s worse than this blatant authorial self-insert is that it is written very poorly and almost entirely as exposition as Yun recounts the whole story to AA as part of a very long conversation that takes up something like half the book. Liu’s writing in his trilogy had a kind of poetic sensibility in its prose but Baoshu’s writing is plain and straightforward. There’s no mistaking one for the other and it doesn’t feel like reading the next book of the same series at all.

The revelation that the battle between the Master and the Lurker is an endlessly repeating cycle is admittedly a fresh addition to the material. It does rather undermine Liu’s vision of a prevailing Dark Forest throughout the universe, arguing that conflict exists because space makes conflict and misunderstanding possible. In asserting that the perfect 10-dimensional universe has an infinite speed of light, there is a kind of poetic beauty is playing off time and space in this way against the themes of change and growth. But I feel that this is once again style over substance, imagination writ large on a grand stage but actually drawing on familiar themes of recurrence and deterministic fate. I do not think that it is a victory of the imagination to vastly expand the scale of the story but populate it with characters with psychologies that are just the same as always. Indeed, here just as in Liu’s work, the characters essentially never evolve and never change even if they have existed for millions or billions of years. In the end, Yun still feels the most attachment to the Earth that he knew during his original life. In the same way, AA acts like a petulant girl with Yun because in the author’s estimation that is just how girls infatuated with a man are supposed to act. It is ridiculous that Baoshu is able to imagine that the descendants of Earth might be unrecognizably different from us, yet gender roles are immutable.

I can commend Baoshu for reading the trilogy so closely that he is able to keep track of many details that I have since forgotten and is intelligent enough to come up with explanation in places where he feels the plot has holes. It is even brave of him to come up with an alternative cosmology that effectively replaces Liu’s Dark Forest vision of the universe. But this remains a far inferior work in terms of imagination and prose and even heightens flaws like the misogyny already present to gag-inducing levels. I really wanted to like this but this is ultimately not a very good piece of fan-fiction and it won’t provide a satisfactory sense of closure even to dedicated fans of the trilogy. Best to skip it.