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htliang
Nov 21, 2016htliang rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
A stunning ending to an epic science-fiction trilogy. Cixin Liu’s creative and technical ability continues to amaze me. This novel includes a love story, a frozen brain launched into space, human hibernation, four dimensions, black holes, etc. The novel could have been broken down into three or four smaller books for easier reading. Any sci-fi fan who wants to be immersed in science and possible future scenarios will find this a great read. Space is a dark forest; any noise or light might reveal your location to potential enemies. “When humanity finally learned that the universe was a dark forest in which everyone hunted everyone else, the child who had once cried out for contact by the bright campfire put out the fire and shivered in the darkness…” The only way to keep Trisolarans from destroying humanity is through the use of dark forest deterrence. This threat of sending out a signal to the universe (that could potentially destroy both civilizations) keeps the enemy at bay until a devastating mistake is made. Note that this is not an easy read; there is a lot of science on almost every page, such as: “The fundamental principle of gravitational wave transmission relied on the vibration of a long string of extremely dense matter. The ideal transmission antenna would involve a large number of black holes connected together to form a chain that generated gravitational waves as it vibrated…” “If the speed of light through vacuum in the Solar System were reduced to below 16.7 kilometers per second, light would no longer be able to escape the gravity of the Sun, and the Solar System would become a black hole. This was an inescapable consequence of the derivation of the Schwarzschild radius of an object, even if the object was the Solar System. More precisely, the necessary speed limit would be even lower if a larger Schwarzschild radius were desired...” Some information was easier to absorb, such as this explanation of four-dimensional space: “People usually resorted to this analogy: Imagine a race of flat beings living inside a two-dimensional picture. No matter how rich or colorful the picture was, the flat people could only see the profile of the world around them. In their eyes, everything consisted of line segments of various lengths. Only when such a two-dimensional being was taken up out of the picture into three-dimensional space and looking down on the world could he see the entirety of the image…”