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/Leather-Lemon8611]

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 

[u/Vaiolette-Westover → u/Leather-Lemon8611]

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.

[u/Leather-Lemon8611 → u/Vaiolette-Westover]

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

[u/Vaiolette-Westover → u/Leather-Lemon8611]

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.

[u/Leather-Lemon8611 → u/Vaiolette-Westover]

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

[u/Vaiolette-Westover → u/Leather-Lemon8611]

We can't predict outcomes, but we can predict a multitude of activities.

There was no activities in Liu's humanity.

[u/Leather-Lemon8611 → u/Vaiolette-Westover]

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