This is a review about The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End — as it’s one story and reviewing an individual book in this series makes little sense.

Science-fiction is best when it confronts big issues, when it sees us from the far-flung high-tech future, and from that distance looks at the things inside & among us that make us humans. And Cixin Liu, with this series, does that more than any other sci-fi book I’ve read. The story spans from China’s 20th century to the far-far future, combining history, literature, philosophy and science into a poetic tale, drunk on imagination but accurate on logic.

What if you could escape Earth? Destroy Earth? Threaten to destroy Earth? What if you’re cut off from Earth and know you can never return? And what do these things mean to your humanity? What does it mean to be human when other species are out there? And why have we never seen them? This series takes the ‘first contact’ genre to the extreme and answers all these questions.