Recently I had the pleasure of reading what is likely the most terrifying science fiction book series I’ve ever read. I’ve always enjoyed scary stories. As a kid, I read anthologies like goosebumps or scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. But I didn’t know true fear until I encountered the works of Stephen King, and H.P. Lovecraft in my teenage years. Lovecraft’s works opened up such terrifying vistas of thought that I would while reading them become transfixed and filled with ultimate existential dread. The cosmic terrors he wrote about in his stories struck me as somehow realer than the monsters and ghost of goosebumps and that is probably because in truth Lovecraft, being the flawed man he was, was expressing a very simple fear, fear of the unknown. And what is more unknown than the blackness of space. I must admit that not since my early teenage years have I felt such poignant terror while reading as I did when first encountering the work of Lovecraft. That Is until I read the Remembrance of Earth’s past trilogy.
There are three books in this series, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Deaths End, there is also an additional book not written by Cixin Liu himself, called Redemption of Time. The first books in the series The Three-Body Problems start off as a mystery. As the story unfolds it starts to feel as though we are reading the unfolding of some grand conspiracy, a conspiracy written into the fabric of the universe itself. Early on in the story, you find out that scientists around the world have been killing themselves. A note left behind by one of the late scientists, Yang Dong ominously added to the mysteries, saying only: