Liu’s science fiction trilogy succeeds in combining realistic contemporary physics, plausible futuristic extrapolations, historical eastern philosophy, and cultural sociology all within a grippingly mysterious narrative. This novel continues the story of “The Three Body Problem”, but most of the main characters are new, even as humanity’s existential threat remains. Ye Wenjie reappears in the opening pages of the novel, coining a new field in the social sciences, and setting the table for the rest of the plot, in her usual enigmatic fashion. “Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society…. Setup a few simple axioms at first, then derive an overall theoretic system using those axioms as a foundation…. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant…. To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.” One constant in Liu’s novels is the reminder that humanity is still extremely young in the timespan of the universe. “The outcome of natural biological evolution requires at least twenty thousand years to manifest itself, but human civilization has just five thousand years of history, and modern technological civilization just two hundred. That means that the study of modern science today is being done by the brain of primitive man.” The novel’s protagonist, Luo Ji, warns, “Everything has an ending. The sun and the universe will die one day, so why should humanity believe that it ought to be immortal?”
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