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!
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