Death's End by Cixin Liu (final book in Three-Body Problem trilogy)
This is a brilliant book, in the sense that I struggled to put it down and that it made worlds shift in my head.
It is not such a great book in that it rather unnecessarily implies that women shouldn't be allowed to make desperate decisions (although when the situation isn't desperate, a feminised society is a very nice place to live and that is as good a purpose of a human life as any other). However it also contains a mini moral against seeing messages in stories; a human spy encodes secret messages in three fairytales, and immediately an author explains that there is no way to be sure you have obtained a correct meaning from the complex story. (The stories end up falling into the venerable trope of "foreshadowing things recognisable only in hindsight").
The tension in the story is that we are accustomed to tales where goodness is rewarded. We like to believe that the universe is a more-than-zero-sum game, that cooperating is ultimately a viable solution and defecting on cooperation will ultimately be punished. This fictional universe keeps showing us - through our protagonist Cheng Xin - that it isn't like that. The universe of The Dark Forest was already shown to be a less than zero sum game - a game where to play forces you to destroy, and not to play is not an option.
Cheng Xin herself is a bit of a cipher, a woman who is intelligent, pretty and kind but mostly has things happen to her. When she does do something, it is usually the wrong thing, and while it is not really her fault (in the first failure, she is elected to a post requiring a complete psychopath who would obviously push the mutual destruct button, and of course she fails. In her second failure, she refuses to allow researchers to use a superweapon to defend their work from the rest of humanity, and destroys the hope of any large numbers of humans escaping the Solar System. It is not as silly as it sounds). You want her choices to work out, you really do, but this universe does not work like that. Also, while Cheng Xin is not much of a character, her spunky and loyal (and female and slightly ruthless) assistant AA is pretty good.
The Trisolarans, the aliens who precipitate the events of the series by popping round to Earth for art appreciation and genocide, are quite well done - never described or met directly, but clearly both alien and as rational and as moral as humanity. (Which is saying very little; the characters find that it takes just five minutes for humans cut off from Earth and in space to turn to murder and cannibalism). There are a couple of other alien species encountered briefly and effectively, more alien than if there was just a bar where everyone drinks.
The end is ambiguous - Cheng Xin, having survived the death of the solar system with a toyboy in a mini universe, realises that the war between civilisations cannot be stopped and cannot help but unravel the universe itself. There is some possibility that if everyone gives up their mini universes, there will be a Big Crunch and another multidimensional universe will be born - after then. Cheng Xin, of course, gives up her ringside seat for the end of the universe and we never find out if this was another of her pointless acts of goodwill. It is a surprisingly effective ending because it is a note of hope without explicitly undermining the premises of despair in the rest of the novel.
So, I really enjoyed it. The ethics of presenting such a pitiless world do concern me a bit. The first novel got some support in the Hugos from right wing nutcases, presumably because this is a world where Might is Right. (And ultimately destroys the universe). I don't know Cixin Liu's politics, but I don't think that imagining a bleak universe should be the sole preserve of the right wing. The actual book I want to compare it with - bizarrely - is T H White's The Once and Future King. Which is one of my favourites because it is concerned partly with Arthur's desire to create an England not ruled by force majeure but by justice and mercy, and the only way he can think of to do so is by superior force. This conflict is part of his tragedy, and I wish I could write something 1% as good about this dilemma for the human race.
It is not such a great book in that it rather unnecessarily implies that women shouldn't be allowed to make desperate decisions (although when the situation isn't desperate, a feminised society is a very nice place to live and that is as good a purpose of a human life as any other). However it also contains a mini moral against seeing messages in stories; a human spy encodes secret messages in three fairytales, and immediately an author explains that there is no way to be sure you have obtained a correct meaning from the complex story. (The stories end up falling into the venerable trope of "foreshadowing things recognisable only in hindsight").
The tension in the story is that we are accustomed to tales where goodness is rewarded. We like to believe that the universe is a more-than-zero-sum game, that cooperating is ultimately a viable solution and defecting on cooperation will ultimately be punished. This fictional universe keeps showing us - through our protagonist Cheng Xin - that it isn't like that. The universe of The Dark Forest was already shown to be a less than zero sum game - a game where to play forces you to destroy, and not to play is not an option.
Cheng Xin herself is a bit of a cipher, a woman who is intelligent, pretty and kind but mostly has things happen to her. When she does do something, it is usually the wrong thing, and while it is not really her fault (in the first failure, she is elected to a post requiring a complete psychopath who would obviously push the mutual destruct button, and of course she fails. In her second failure, she refuses to allow researchers to use a superweapon to defend their work from the rest of humanity, and destroys the hope of any large numbers of humans escaping the Solar System. It is not as silly as it sounds). You want her choices to work out, you really do, but this universe does not work like that. Also, while Cheng Xin is not much of a character, her spunky and loyal (and female and slightly ruthless) assistant AA is pretty good.
The Trisolarans, the aliens who precipitate the events of the series by popping round to Earth for art appreciation and genocide, are quite well done - never described or met directly, but clearly both alien and as rational and as moral as humanity. (Which is saying very little; the characters find that it takes just five minutes for humans cut off from Earth and in space to turn to murder and cannibalism). There are a couple of other alien species encountered briefly and effectively, more alien than if there was just a bar where everyone drinks.
The end is ambiguous - Cheng Xin, having survived the death of the solar system with a toyboy in a mini universe, realises that the war between civilisations cannot be stopped and cannot help but unravel the universe itself. There is some possibility that if everyone gives up their mini universes, there will be a Big Crunch and another multidimensional universe will be born - after then. Cheng Xin, of course, gives up her ringside seat for the end of the universe and we never find out if this was another of her pointless acts of goodwill. It is a surprisingly effective ending because it is a note of hope without explicitly undermining the premises of despair in the rest of the novel.
So, I really enjoyed it. The ethics of presenting such a pitiless world do concern me a bit. The first novel got some support in the Hugos from right wing nutcases, presumably because this is a world where Might is Right. (And ultimately destroys the universe). I don't know Cixin Liu's politics, but I don't think that imagining a bleak universe should be the sole preserve of the right wing. The actual book I want to compare it with - bizarrely - is T H White's The Once and Future King. Which is one of my favourites because it is concerned partly with Arthur's desire to create an England not ruled by force majeure but by justice and mercy, and the only way he can think of to do so is by superior force. This conflict is part of his tragedy, and I wish I could write something 1% as good about this dilemma for the human race.