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: 2014 (English translation)

Read: January 2021

One-Line Summary: Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens.

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: 7.5/10

Opening Sentence: “The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days.”

Who Should Read This?

• People who live in the future, with access to today’s literature
• Physics enthusiasts (although I didn’t check any math)
• Friends and foes of humanity
• Anyone looking to embark on a ~1,500 page trilogy because this is the first of three books and hey, you’ve got nothing else going on right now…

Notable Quotables

• “Should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?” (Ye Zhetai)
• Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.…It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.
• “Buddy, when I work at night, if I look up at the sky, the suspect is going to escape.” (Da Shi)
• “The reason why the sun’s motion seems patternless is because our world has three suns. Under the influence of their mutually perturbing gravitational attraction, their movements are unpredictable—the three-body problem.” (Wang Miao)
• We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.
• “You’re bugs!”