Rating: 5 out of 5
I was slightly taken aback by the change in tone in this book. The first had brought me into the story, with a fairly likable set of characters. We ditch almost all of them immediately and come to follow some other folks who are responsible for “saving Earth” (not that they call it the same way). As the story develops, the characters who are introduced to the reader as the Wallfacers and Wallbreakers. It’s perhaps a surprise that so many of the Wallfacers are more or less completely useless, but of course it wouldn’t have made for a good story otherwise: and here’s where we can focus on Luo Ji.
Luo Ji’s approach to the entire undertaking is something that looks on the whole to be a much better way of going about to achieve results than the other Wallfacer’s ideas. The calm life and his slowly developing understanding of “the dark forest” that the universe is, make for a captivating — though chilling — read. Yet, Luo comes across as wholly human on almost all counts.
The result of the Earth vs Trisolaran probe encounter is something that’s foreshadowed very much in the book, based on the overconfidence of one side, but it remains to be seen whether people would actually in this situation be as stupid as the Earth folks seem to be: all evidence points to the fact that, yes, we would indeed. That said, it’s clearly another proof also that to send extra resources to where they are (theoretically) not needed, is a waste. And in this case, this would have changed a whole lot about the entire story.
And, yet, it’s Luo Ji’s actions and inactions which proved the most interesting. But in many ways the conclusion to this could also be considered the end of the main story. Of course, thing can always go wrong, but at least where the reader is left off, one could think that the crisis has been averted and that future is peachy.
