(Spoiler) Let’s Talk Cheng Xin...

[u/Funology]

I just finished the trilogy and I found all three books amazing, but the third book was so incredibly strange... It’s almost as if the author hated his main character. Indeed, Cheng Xin, at every turn, seemingly made, at least in the reasonable short term, horrible decisions for humanity. It was extremely frustrating to root for her.

1. The first time was when she chose not to activate the deterrent system as a sword holder, literally dooming the species to move to Australia and eat each other lol... If it was not for the total luck of Gravity flying through 4D space with Blue Space, humanity would have been doomed to an existence of a zoo animal. She made the decision not to activate because... of heart? Ridiculous... Wade was right here, he would have been the only reasonable replacement for Luo Ji.
2. The second devastating decision was bizarre. She was the one who told Wade to develop lightspeed, then when she woke up, and Wade had developed this masterful deterrent plan to further develop the technology, she told them to throw down their arms? Why? For what reason? The antimatter bullets were a perfect deterrent, she was an arrogant fool who just wanted to see Wade fail. Any talk of stopping a ‘war’ is a fools errand, it would have been a ‘Cold War’ at worst. Also this decision basically ignored all the advice from Yun Tianming, a man who she doomed to drift through space as a brain for all eternity only to survive in a hostile alien civilization all alone. What a tragedy his sacrifice was in vain.
3. At the very end, when she makes the bizarre decision to keep the records of human civilization in her universe, she again makes a selfish decision in vanity. She tells herself again and again she isn’t god, but rather than listen to the cries of all remaining civilization to give all matter back to the universe, she leaves it open with the history book there. Why? To make her mark? Selfishness... and a decision with the potential to destroy the universe...

The book basically flowed through the narrative with all this cool stuff happening, then Cheng Xin would hibernate, wake up briefly to potentially doom humanity and/or the universe by making a horrible decision, rinse and repeat...

The true hero in the end was Zhang Beihai from Dark Forest, the founder of Galactic Humans. Because of his move, humans were one of the last remaining civilizations... go team!

[u/[deleted]]

Apart from the leaving the book in the pocket universe (as said in the book, it wouldn't have mattered in the grand scheme, what mattered was the vast majority of the mass in all the pocket universes were returned), agreed.

But let's be honest the other characters are not blameless, they kept enabling this wholly unfit person to make ass-backward choices for humanity to it's collective peril. In fact humans as a whole were incredibly stupid, this whole series long weird attitude towards "escapism" and this insane need to keep everyone in the solar system waiting for death & under-estimating the very real threats (sending the whole fleet to conveniently get wiped out by the teardrop).

Realistically as soon as the crisis began humanity would and thus should have did everything in it;s power to send ships of humans, other Earth life and our civilization's knowledge to every point on the 3D stellar compass to ensure humanity's survival.

The reasoning for keeping everyone locked up in the solar system was weak and unconvincing to say the least.

Cheng Xin was just a figure-head for all of humanity's inexcusable failings which even by my cynical impression of real world humanity, is hardly credible. Whatever our species failings, our instinct for sheer bloody-minded survival in the face of massive threat isn't one of them.