Sadly enough, this book was quite a disappointment to me. As successor to The Three-Body Problem, it again tries to pose some thought provoking questions. But in the end these interesting nuggets were far too few, and the remainder of the book felt flat and unimaginative.

I noticed that the translator of this book is different to its successor, which might explain my feeling that the writing was bland. But even after that, the characters felt flat, and their growths' essentially nonexistent. I especially loathed the whole family dynamic of the main character, which felt like a distasteful joke. The story, and decisions of the characters, also felt full of holes.

The saving grace of the book are the questions of how humans adapt in different scenarios, and how to handle new inter-planetary contacts. However, there are far too few of these, and most of them feel a bit too simple.