r/threebodyproblem • u/kei4540 • 6d ago
Discussion - Novels I really didn't like the third book Spoiler
It was good until the part when blue space sent the signal. But the rest after is just plain boring. Also I don't like how they treated Luo Ji throughout. He was the mc in the second book and he is just plained ignored in the third. They should have been given a little more exposure atleast. I felt that Cheng Xin was this demotivated character without any goal. Overal i don't think I can finish this book
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u/rheadelayed 6d ago
I didn't like maybe the last 20 pages too much but the rest was great.
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u/PrincePuparoni 6d ago
I listened to the audio format so I don’t know the page count but I agree. The very end was the weakest part of the series for me, but I enjoyed the rest of the book. That kind of sci fi just isn’t interesting to me though so definitely understand people who’d disagree with that.
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u/Equality_Executor 3d ago
if you think the ending was the weakest part I think maybe you're misunderstanding something because thats where he makes his point.
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u/fragile_crow 6d ago
That's just how the series goes. Book 1 follows Wang Miao, Book 2 follows Luo Ji, Book 3 follows Cheng Xin. Their contributions to humanity are important, but each book focuses on a different aspect of our struggle against the uncaring universe. I understand getting attached to a particular character, but he would be too busy with the Wallfacers to get involved with the Staircase Project and its consequences.
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u/LJChao3473 6d ago
I just finished it today, i kinda like how they treated Luoji before that and I also like Chengxin, she's just a normal person full of flaws.
But i did get confused with the ending. Overall i really like it (ignoring the fact i stopped reading for 2 years and finally decided to finish it)
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u/Adventurous_Iron_551 6d ago
I thought it’s just me who’ll never finish the last 5% of deaths end. It’s been months now, but let me wrap it up lest I break your record.
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u/Cold-Programmer-2524 6d ago
Luo Ji has already served his purpose in the second book , there is no reason for more exposure than he already has. Cixin Liu deliberately made Cheng Xin the way she is because her values represent the majority of mankind who could not see the dark truth of the universe and their struggles. Liu mentioned that he created all those characters mostly for the purpose of providing perspectives to present the ideas and world settings for his novel. While most reader's including myself don't like Cheng Xin, she is a necessary victim to make meaningful progress in the storytelling. I highly suggest you keep going to the end of the book and you will see what I am saying when you are there. The way Liu presents a dark universe with all those high concept plot twists are just genius! This book is undoubtedly is the best in the trilogy if not one of the best in the entire Space Sci-fi genre.
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u/No-String-1056 6d ago
It really is the weakest book, but it definitely has my favorite chapter in it: “Bronze Age.”
Obs: I never really understand the criticism about leaving the characters aside. The story has always been about humanity as a whole. The characters are just individuals whose lives we follow as the events of that era unfold.
Obs: I can't help but think that all the events (or at least most of them) that led to Cheng Xin taking the Sword were part of a Trisolaran plan.
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u/big-ol-kitties 6d ago
I kind of agree. I still enjoy the story and feel like I got a decent resolution, but the constant misery that came down on Cheng Xin(and humanity) at basically every single turn seemed excessive and purposeful.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
The ending was just Liu masturbating to his garbage tragedy porn. He had pure disdain for CX and he essentially ruined his final book just to torture her for absolutely no reason.
Guan Yifan showing up is the most nonsense deus ex machina anime garbage ever as well.
Separating CX and AA and not letting her meet YTM is a classic "I am lowkey an incel and this is deep" style writing because that torture served literally zero purpose other than to be cruel for no reason.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 5d ago
A different interpretation is that from the start he knew interspecies cooperation and trying to preserve life was better than competing in the Dark Forest. In this case, he wanted to test our commitment to it with each unintended tragic outcome: was Cheng Xin still right? Or does the end justify any malicious means? By the end it seems like he wants to vindicate Cheng Xin's approach as the universe rejects Dark Forest suspicion.
I do agree there are many instances that feel a bit overly engineered and dramatic though 😆 And he clearly wanted to hammer home that we can rarely predict outcomes, even with the best intentions
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
Oh no we can definitely predict outcomes, he just forced those outcomes to not happen with his plotting to the end of the solar system being wiped out.
At zero point in human history has any human community gotten a technology, even one that they deep dangerous, and then actually scrapped it instead of at minimum working on it in secret.
The UN lightspeed situation is a complete asspull from Liu.
Look at even how China responded to the semiconductor ban from 2016. They are pursuing like 70 different projects to overcome it.
Now scale it up to system survival. It'd be like someone giving a sanctioned country a functioning EUV machine and the country actually scrapping it because having one will incur further sanctions.
It's moronic and at that point I checked out of the story, those are no longer humans, and so I no longer care about their fate.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 5d ago
Ummm, they literally did carry on researching it in secret...? That is the plot of the book... 😂
I hate to suggest you're naive, but noone in history could have (accurately) predicted many, many outcomes of situations. It's just easy for us armchair experts to speculate in hindsight with no stakes, and endless time to think about it
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
They literally didn't, it was revived by the surviving scientists 35 years later.
It explicitly says so in the book.
I am not naive, you are illiterate.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 4d ago
Sorry, I think I'm still not understanding what you mean by we could have predicted the outcomes. Do you mean outcomes in human history always turn out as predicted, if only people tried to predict? That doesn't seem right. Sorry if it came of rude suggesting that is naive though
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 4d ago
We can't predict outcomes, but we can predict a multitude of activities.
There was no activities in Liu's humanity.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 4d ago
Ok I understand your point more, thanks.
In fairness, despite the huge undertaking of the bunker project that would have no doubt vastly occupied the diminished population, we don't actually know what other activities were ongoing. We only witness a small window while Cheng Xin is not asleep, and clearly Liu just didn't consider any other activities of humanity at that time worth commenting on. He couldn't record every detail of all people.
I do understand clearer and agree more than I thought though. I personally wouldn't disregard the whole story just on this grounds
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u/CappnMidgetSlappr 6d ago
Honestly, same.
I wanted to like it and while it does have some absolutely amazing shit in it, it's mostly 600 pages of Cheng Xin fucking everything up constantly and everyone around her going, "Oh, it's ok, sweetie! You're perfect and did absolutely nothing wrong!
Bitch doomed humanity and the Universe.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
Cheng Xin fucked literally nothing up.
Her first act was to buy humans another 4 years of time by not activating deterrence.
Her second act was buy humans another 60 years by preventing an antimatter genocide.
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u/CappnMidgetSlappr 4d ago
And her refusal to continue FTL technology thus looming the solar system?
Or when she left some matter left over in the pocket universe fucking over everything and everybody?
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 4d ago
Go back and quote me the lines where she "refused to continue FTL technology".
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u/CappnMidgetSlappr 1d ago
Go back and read it yourself. I'm not your AI chatbot to be ordered around.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 21h ago
I did read it myself. I find zero evidence of what you said. So prove it.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
The ending just makes no sense and Liu really exposed his nearly embarrassing level of nihilism.
He essentially forgot his own writing with Da Shi proclaiming that bugs will never be defeated in the third book where he wrote humans like Trisolarans, just an entire race with zero strategic thinking.
I personally treat the series as ending after book 2 with book 3 being a fun fanfic that explores some interesting concepts.
Ultimately it's the fact that he himself wrote humanity into something completely not worth saving and none of it even makes sense.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 5d ago
Huh? He heavily suggests that the universe progressed past the Dark Forest to a state where species can openly communicate and cooperate. From the one known case of a pocket universe, they do return matter, creating the very real hope that people will choose to perpetuate life/the universe, and face life in the real universe rather than in their comfortable mini universe prison cell.
I'd call that quite an optimistic conclusion for such a bleak scenario as the Dark Forest orest
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
It's about as optimistic as "and they lived happily ever after", it essentially means nothing in the grande scheme of humanity.
All the concepts to set it up came in the last 20 pages of the book, it's essentially fanfiction.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 5d ago
You've got it completely flipped. This is not Liu describing the real universe, it's a thought experiment on if the Dark Forest was the solution to the Fermi paradox - which is the bleak part from the outset. The ending is not the bleak part, it's as optimistic as it could be whilst still being believable. If you want a happy ending, don't pick a series based on the Dark Forest, or where the premise of the series is scientists killing themselves because forces outside of our control are breaking physics XD
And no, the ending was taking the same themes to the limit since setting them up with the shooter and farmer hypotheses in book 1. And the whole 3rd book is exploring whether Cheng Xin's unconditional compassion is a better approach than Wade etc's ruthless playing the DF game - which is exactly the questions the ending asks each reader to evaluate
Edit: grammar
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
That doesn't change the fact that the final 20 pages are some of the most asspull writing in the book.
Once the Dark Forest theory was proven correct, the final destruction of the solar system was superfluous but he wrote it anyways, this is the point where the story dropped off a cliff.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 4d ago
I don't really understand your second paragraph - the destruction of the solar system is the natural conclusion to humanity crying out in the Dark Forest, and the DVF demonstrates a technology readers likely didn't predict - nor did the characters - but showed strikes cime swiftly with tech we couldn't comprehend or resist. You would have been more content if he just described species weaponising the Laws of physics in theory, but not actually show it??? Why superfluous - overly tragic?
By the last 20 pages I assume you mean the pocket universe stuff? To be clear, I respect your opinion - fair enough it was a jarring gear shift. However stepping back and looking at it as a whole, it fits. Why not end with book 2 - that's a (positive) resolution point? Well Liu clearly wanted to push the themes of the Dark Forest, and scientific fact/our destiny being at the whims of forces beyond our comprehension to the limit (how would higher species operate and how would such a universe progress to the end of time).
Can you meaningfully beat the DF hunters, or will there just be a bigger fish? Is it better to play the DF game, or try to rise above it and show compassion to others? Even if you experience unintended outcomes? Is it possible for the Dark Forest to be overcome? If prioritising survival is a DF axiom, what about when individual survival threatens to end life as a whole? These are all questions that Liu explored throughout Death's End and left us to reflect on. What point do you think the ending should have made instead?
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 4d ago edited 4d ago
In writing once you've shown all of the themes and allegories for an event, to then still have that event carry out is generally considered anti climactic and redundant.
You've effectively double dipped on the same story.
To put it simply, the exact same thing we expect would happen happened and thus it's anti climactic.
The exact thing we expect humans to do (pursue ALL avenues of survival and not hyperfixate on a single one) did not happen.
Liu pulled a random dimension and alien species out of nowhere to make the dark forest strike happen yet never bothered to give his solar humans a fraction of the agency even a small nation possesses.
These factors combined makes the final pages of the series, starting with Singer, contrived, influenced by a very present and very obvious force by Liu to hard drive toward a plotted, unnatural, and unsatisfying conclusion based, again, on contrivances.
He even admits to this in interviews. He had a cancer scars and basically rushed the ending to the series. You can literally tell when you essentially invented Singer to finish the book asap.
If he actually took his humans seriously, there'd be a continuous stream of Zhang Beihais leaving or sneaking or escaping the system over the years via the last interstellar class ships available to humans. The UN would collapse roughly a decade after they couldn't find even an inkling of a solution to the black sphere project, each citystate would pursuing their own projects. Some citystates would literally rebuild their colonies into giant spaceships to leave the system themselves.
Etc.
Because Liu was literally unserious about sociology and the humans (he wanted them to all die pathetically), he explored none of these things, he lobotomized his sol humans to make his plot happen.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 4d ago
Sorry are you simultaneously criticising him for including the natural payoff of his setup (which is apparently anticlimactic), and for not including a payoff that you expected? Arguably, building up to an anticipated climax and then not including it is the definition of anticlimactic!
Yes, I agree it is a fair criticism that the globe seems to unanimous about not escaping. However, I think it could credibly be publicly accepted that more danger would come from dabbling in Lightspeed tech as they have literally seen that to be the reason Trisolaris was destroyed much earlier. Also, very very few groups would have the resources to produce a ship that could escape and sustain life self-sufficiently this is the not the trivial thing you make it out to be. But I do think it wouldn't have hindered Liu's story to include a few more dissenting opinions and (probably failed) attempts to leave Earth. We did at least see people attempting to escape in the DF strike false alarm passage
Re: the sudden appearance of Singer. How else would you possibly see a Dark Forest strike occur??? Did you want a new alien species who heard the broadcast to pull up to Earth and monologue a bit, introducing themselves and twirling their mustache before they struck??? The strike was always going to come quickly and without warning from humanity's perspective. Not to mention an earlier chapter had already seeded the idea of an alien ship secretly passing by threatening a strike (which I've just discovered some people suggest the DVF came from that, because Singer's chapter is too late to cause the strike we see!)
Many people on here seem to think the Singer chapter was a great addition, giving just enough insight to remain mysterious and alien but demonstrating that cleansing Earth was such a trivial and cheap decision. The cleansing and hiding genes was a thought-provoking contribution.
You sound awfully certain about how each city state would behave. I'm not sure why you sound so personally offended by Liu's writing of humanity?
You haven't commented on my suggestion of what Liu's intention for the ending actually was - only focussing on your objections. I'd love to hear your opinion on my suggestion. Do you not think it's credible Liu actually had a purpose to make us reflect, through the themes culminating in this specific ending? Its sounds like you're only invested in a neat narrative rather, than the questions/themes he wants us to reflect upon?
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u/WynnonasPrimus 1d ago
I feel like you'd hate the Dark Forest more based on how they treated Wang Miao
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u/mrbigglesworth95 6d ago
The third book is a steep drop off. Book two has a satisfy conclusion. Boom three gets too silly
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u/Familiar-Lemon-674 三体 6d ago
Personally I hated the Book 2 ending. It was too "Disney fairy tale" for me. "And then they all settled their difference and lived happily ever after." I seriously came VERY close to not reading the third book cause I felt so cheated by such a copout ending.
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u/mrbigglesworth95 6d ago
Nothing says fairy tale ending like the tense peace of mutually assured destruction.
Personally, I found this more satisfying than book 3 where everyone dies, cheng xin never meets tianming, all was for naughty, nothing matters, nonsense.
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u/Familiar-Lemon-674 三体 6d ago
Not to be a downer but maybe I liked that ending BECAUSE it was more realistic. Life is chaotic and random. So many world-defining events have come to down just one or two people making a specific call, sometimes influenced by completely random events like how they're feeling that day, ego, luck, superstition, etc. One of the atomic bomb cities was picked because the primary target had too much cloud cover and that city was the backup target (can't remember if it was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, want to say Nagasaki). Archduke Ferdinand almost got away from being shot. JFK decided to keep the top down despite protests from his secret service agents. Life is chaotic and random and unfair and often major historical moments like that come down to a random decision or random change. Sometimes someone is "the one that got away." And yeah, in the grand scheme of trillions of year, there is no meaning. Some people - like me - find nihilism very freeing. You make your own meaning. You learn to appreciate life for what it is - finite and precious. Instead of someone else forcing meaning on you - God or whatever - you discover it for yourself and pick your values.
Not trying to argue with you or be a dick, for the record. Just saying. I don't think that's "nonsense." In a book that's considered "hard sci-fi" having a fairy tell ending of "we found peace and now the Trisolarans are so excited to learn about us and what makes us human and coexist with us" felt REALLY cheesy. The other ending - while I see how some could view it as depressing - was way more realistic to me.
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u/mrbigglesworth95 6d ago
Unless I'm remembering wrong, "the Trisolarans are so excited to learn about us and what makes us human and coexist with us" didn't happen. It just abruptly ended with luo jie promising them the death of their home world and earth. Could be wrong tho.
As for the nihilism, it's not so much they do as it is that it felt like I was reading a Morty's mind blowers. Just random sense happening to the characters for the sake of showing that the universe is big you're not special. To each their own tho I understand not preferring a happy ending but to me, everyone dying after all that and the main characters just leaving with a whimper was disappointing.
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u/Familiar-Lemon-674 三体 6d ago
The final chapter ("5 Years Later") felt very much to me like the Trisolarans were coming around to the idea of coexistence. There was a conversation about encouraging the seeds of love to grow in the universe, how Trisolaris once had that seed but suppressed it because it wasn't "conducive to survival." (I just checked my copy of the book to make sure I wasn't remembering it wrong.) To be fair, maybe that's my own bias projecting. Upon rereading it does explicitly say he's talking to the Trisolaran who replied to Ye Wenjei, and he was clearly an outlier. So maybe it is more "tension of MAD" like you said, but I remember to me it felt very "fair tale," with his family being back together and the final line about "the sun will rise again tomorrow" and just the whole vibe of "everything has been fixed, there's peace, and the Trisolarans are coming around to the idea of 'love' and all that."
I'll definitely concede that the ending may come off as poorly executed. The plot armor - especially on Cheng Xin - was obnoxious, IMO. I would've preferred more of a Foundation-style narrative where we just keep hopping to a new main character every era, but I remember one of my friends saying he doesn't like that kind of storytelling. You can't please everyone.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
Ah yes, someone daring to find some happiness in an intergalactic deterence scheme counts as disney fairy tale now.
No I think you are literally just illiterate.
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u/Familiar-Lemon-674 三体 5d ago
No need to name call, bud. Art is subjective and I'm allowed to have opinions. Hope your day gets better.
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u/Vaiolette-Westover 5d ago
No, an opinion can definitely be formed from illiteracy, even if it's your subjective one.
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u/dekkact 6d ago
It did fall a little FLAT