If this were a technical rating, the book would get 5 stars. For me however, the book felt like a bit of a slog. It took me 2 months to read it and the story line, good gosh, feels like it is stretched across time.
I felt like there were large sections of the story that didn't really apply to anything in the overall arch that we were following - or maybe it was so long that I lost the thread of the story!
It also felt like the main protagonist, Cheng Xin, was being constantly punished by the author - although she does admit her own uphill climb in one of the later chapters entitled "The Stairs of Responsibility".
The ending of the book (last 15%) also describes in detail the end of the Solar System. It's pretty visual and pretty bleak, and one heck of an idea to wrap my head around.
In fact, the book is full of ideas that are hard to wrap my head around - and that's what Liu Cixin does amazingly well.
For me though, as someone who is reasonably new to hard sci-fi, I found this book to tip me over the edge into "whoa, this is a bit much". I've also read that apparently there's a fourth book in the works (or even finished) and I've no idea how that story would even continue!!!
As for the contents of the story, I'm not sure I can even explain - certainly epic and thought provoking!
25 Highlight(s)
If the parameters of the big bang had been different by even one million billionth, we would have no heavy elements and thus no life. Isn't this clear evidence for intelligent design?"
They had achieved wa kei sei jaku—harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility, the four principles of the Way of Tea.
He fell in love with Cheng Xin's mother in large part because of how much she loved Cheng Xin. And so a second sun appeared in Cheng Xin's life.
This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other.
The strands attracted other molecules around them until two identical copies of the original were made, and these split apart again and replicated themselves.... In this game of building blocks, the probability of producing such a self-replicating chain of organic molecules was so minuscule that it was as if a tornado had picked up a pile of metallic trash and deposited it as a fully-assembled Mercedes-Benz.
The humans alone possessed one hundred billion pairs of eyes, equal to the number of stars in the Milky Way.
Thus, theocracy, a zombie even more ancient than totalitarianism, reanimated itself.
The experience of high-dimensional spatial sense was a spiritual baptism. In one moment, concepts like freedom, openness, profundity, and infinity all gained brand-new meanings.
Faced with the catastrophe four light-years away, human society became strangely quiet. Everyone seemed to be waiting, but at a loss as to what they were waiting for.
But the king knew that the wolf had only hidden his teeth,
Cheng Xin understood right away. As the soap dissolved in the water, it lowered the surface tension of the water behind the boat. But as the tension in the water in front of the boat remained unchanged, it pulled the boat forward.
Death is the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades in the world, but Death endures."
The third cosmic velocity of the Solar System was 16.7 kilometers per second. A spacecraft from the Earth could not leave the Solar System without exceeding this limit.
even Singer himself couldn't be sure what told him that the set of coordinates was sincere—intuition could not always be explained.
Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.
But someone came up with the idea that theoretically, there might exist image-processing software that could process a two-dimensionalized image of a three-dimensional object and re-create the three-dimensional object.
This building was intended to last through geologic eons."
Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time.
A museum was built for visitors; a tombstone was built for the builders.
"At every moment in history, you can find endless missed opportunities."
time began. There is no appropriate expression in human language to express the moment at the start of time.
This obsession with home and land, this permanent adolescence where you're no longer children but are afraid to leave home—this is the fundamental reason your race was annihilated.
As a matter of fact, the monitoring systems in Universe 647 often received messages from other great universes on the supermembrane.
And now, I've climbed to the apex of responsibility: I am responsible for the fate of the universe.
The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.
Others I've read in the "Remembrance of Earth’s Past" series: