One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2016 (English translation)

Read: March 2021

Publisher Summary: Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: 8/10

Opening Sentence: Pausing to collect himself, Constantine XI pushed away the pile of city-defense maps in front of him, pulled his purple robe tighter, and waited.

Who Should Read This?

• Game theorists and political scientists
• Friends and foes of humanity
• Forlorn lovers
• You made it through the first two books? Fasten your seat-belt and brace for landing.

Notable Quotables (may include spoilers)

• Tianming felt a strange bond with the nurse: after all, she was the last person who would be with him in this world. He wished he knew who had delivered him when he was born twenty-nine years ago. That delivery doctor and this nurse belonged to the small number of people who had genuinely tried to help him during his life. He wanted to thank them.
  “Thank you.”
  The nurse smiled at him and left, her footsteps as silent as a cat’s.
• If hibernation were possible, why would you linger in the present?…As modern biology advanced apace, people began to believe that death’s end would be achievable in one or two more centuries. If so, those who chose hibernation were taking the first steps on the staircase to life everlasting. For the first time in history, Death itself was no longer fair. The consequences were unimaginable.
• That’s right. Five minutes into the all-hands meeting, the fundamental values of this totalitarian society had received the support of the vast majority of the crew. So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.
• “Fine.” AA sighed. “But you should reevaluate your conception of duty and conscience. Duty drove you to you give up the planets, and conscience made you keep the star, but duty again made you give up the star’s energy output.  You’re one of those people from the past, like my dissertation advisor, torn by conflict between two ideals.  But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social pressure personality disorder.  You should seek treatment.”
• The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. The existing social order broke down. All the people cared about was that the government would bring them food, water, and enough space for a bed; nothing else mattered.  Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell. Sophon’s words after she killed those people at the food distribution center – “the era for humanity’s degenerate freedom is over” – became a common slogan, and discarded dregs from the history of ideas, including fascism, crawled out of their tombs to their surface and became mainstream. The power of religions also recovered, and people gathered into different faiths and churches. Thus, theocracy, a zombie even more ancient than totalitarianism, reanimated itself.
• “Mere existence is already the result of incredible luck. Such was the case on Earth in the past, and such has always been the case in this cruel universe. But at some point, humanity began to develop the illusion that they’re entitled to life, that life can be taken for granted. This is the fundamental reason for your defeat. The flag of evolution will be raised once again on this world, and you will now fight for your survival. I hope everyone present will be among the fifty million survivors at the end. I hope that you will eat food, and be eaten by food.”
• “To be clear, we’re trying to ascertain the strategic direction of humanity’s struggles for the future. If this message really exists, no matter what it is, it must have a concrete meaning. We can’t take vague, ambiguous information and turn it into strategic directions. But vagueness and ambiguity are at the heart of true literary expression. Out of security considerations, I’m sure the true meaning behind these three stories is buried very deeply, and this makes the interpretations even more vague and ambiguous. The difficulty we are facing isn’t that we can’t get anything useful out of these three stories, but that there are too many plausible interpretations, and we can’t be certain of any of them.
  “Let me say something else that’s not directly relevant here. As a writer, I want to express my respect for the author. As fairy tales, these are very good.”
• Wade lifted his head and looked at Cheng Xin with rarely seen helplessness and pleading. He spoke slowly. “If we lose out human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”
• Just then, Singer noticed a sincere set of coordinates near the course of the seed. The set of coordinates was broadcast by long membrane, and even Singer himself couldn’t be sure what told him that the set of coordinates was sincere – intuition could not always be explained. He decided to cleanse it. He wasn’t busy, and the task wasn’t going to distract him from singing. Even if he got it wrong, it was not a big deal. Cleansing was not a precision task and didn’t require absolute accuracy. It also wasn’t urgent. He just had to get it done eventually. This was also why his position wasn’t prestigious.
• It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.
• The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.