This book is again translated by Ken Liu who had already translated the first book of the trilogy. It features the same eloquent language as well as the linguistic and cultural translation footnotes I had already praised then.

Overall it reminded me of Culture although with less Clarke-tech and for the most part less utopian. It does however deal with similar scopes and concepts as Matter or Look to Windward. Moreso than its predecessors, this book relies on technical explanations which, apart from dimensional compression all seem quite plausible.

The main character feels quite underdeveloped though, mostly having things happen to her while showing little agency or growth. Quite a shame as there was ample opportunity for good character development.

The final few chapters feel quite rushed. Far too many new concepts are introduced just before the very end which then are not used or expanded upon properly. Nonetheless I think it provides a fitting end to the trilogy.

Parts I particularly liked:

Singer’s Chapter:

A truly alien perspective not unlike Odd Attachment from The State of the Art. It illustrates the titular concept of the previous book without overdoing it. Sometimes adding information to a scary concept weakens it by removing some of the mystery, but I didn’t feel like this was the case here.

The Torus Encounter:

Well executed foreshadowing of later events told in a ominous and almost mystical fashion.

Tianming’s Tales:

At one point, a set of fairly tales is used to covertly convey information from a sort of hostage situation. I stopped reading for a day after each chapter to figure out its meaning and enjoyed this kind of puzzle.

Spoiler for the tales and their meanings follow.

  • I really liked the “He’ershingenmosiken bath soap” idea where a piece of soap is used in the story to pacify dangerous fish. This is then interpreted by Cheng Xin as a means to propel an origami boat forward by attaching a piece of soap to one end. The soap changes the surface tension of the water behind the boat, yielding barely any thrust if repeated. This alludes to the behavior of space-curvature-propulsion, which reduces the speed of light in the engine’s path while accelerating a space ship to relativistic speeds. This effect is not contained in the tale however and even partially contradicted, as the group uses the previously pacified path for their return journey, adding more soap later just to be safe.
  • Needle Eye’s paintings likewise worked well to convey the threat of the dual-vector foil, although I thought it was a bit too direct to pass the Trisolaran’s critical eye during/shortly after the story was told to Cheng Xin. Perhaps the fact that Tianming had written those stories much earlier and even published them as a collection might have distracted the Trisolarans from this point, but surely they must have known that humanity didn’t know about this particular threat.
  • I’m not quite sure whether the spinning umbrella is supposed to signify a balanced dark domain state or escape velocity/light speed. The fact that it has to be spun not too fast and not too slow seems to indicate necessity of balance, perhaps by lowering the speed of light below a certain threshold but not so far to cause total stagnation? The other interpretation is that it signifies near light speed flight away from the center of the attack as a means of escape from the dual-vector foil.
  • Prince Deep Water disobeys the laws of projection, remaining of constant apparent size regardless of viewing distance. This fact makes it impossible for Needle Eye to paint him into a picture. This constancy could be another hint at light speed, however this doesn’t make much sense as the speed of light is later revealed to not be constant. There is another entity in this book that shares the constant apparent size property, the tomb torus within the 4D fragment encountered by Blue Space. Since Prince Deep Water cannot be flattened into a picture, this seems to imply that the tomb could resist flattening as well, however it is obliterated as the fragment collapses into 3D space.

On the Dual-Vector Foil

Spoilers for a major plot point throughout the whole book in this section.

One thing I particularly didn’t like is the dimensional compression. If light speed is required to escape the dual-vector foil attack (as alluded to by the He’ershingenmosiken tale), how could its effects be seen across the whole system?

The idea of structure-preserving projection from 3D to 2D is ridiculous. As someone interested in geometry, I’ve spent quite a long time thinking about how this might work. I have no problem with “magic” Clarke-tech, but my disbelief quickly becomes unsuspended when it comes to logic, geometry, or mathematics.

While space filling curves are a thing and the concept can be expanded to space filling planes, the inverse of which would then map any point in 3D space to a point on the plane, the idea that 3D shapes such as human bodies, space stations or even whole planets remain not just recognizable as what they had been in 3D space but are preserved in all of their “detail” as well doesn’t sit right with me at all. Apart from the weaving kind of space filling curves, I can think of two other methods of reducing 3D objects into 2D space:

  • Orthographic projection: Think of a technical drawing, where every point in space is projected along an axis perpendicular to the plane. Distances parallel to the plane are preserved while distances perpendicular to it are reduced to zero. This is clearly not the case here, since especially the planets and the star are reported to expand to many times their 3D radius.
  • Repelling particles: The atoms entering the plane repel those already inside it, pushing them apart. While this seems the most likely, it certainly does not preserve finer structures of 3D objects, as the particles of each “detail” would be diluted, distorted, and pushed apart by the layers that enter the plane later.

None of these options fulfill the effects described in the book however, to me, expansion due to compressing volume onto a plane seems to strongly conflict with preserving infinite detail from which the 3D structure may be recoverable with sufficient “image processing software”.

I’m very curious how this effect will be portrayed in the netflix series which supposedly covers all three books.