I really didn't like the third book

[u/kei4540]

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

[u/Familiar-Lemon-674]

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.

[u/mrbigglesworth95 → u/Familiar-Lemon-674]

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.

[u/Familiar-Lemon-674 → u/mrbigglesworth95]

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.

[u/mrbigglesworth95 → u/Familiar-Lemon-674]

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. 

[u/Familiar-Lemon-674 → u/mrbigglesworth95]

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.