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Thank you for a sober and much-needed review. I read the books last year looking for the same things, and came up with similar takeaways. I was awestruck by the story's scope and weird ideas, and even though 1) you could see everything hinged on strawmanning (American?) liberalism, 2) the grand game theory games were oversold, and 3) the character work is shoddy and full of backwards gender stuff. I was more than happy to read it as, as someone else pointed out, a mega-scale meditation on Moloch, even though by the end it has stooped to literally sighing a fatherly "you have too rosy a view of things" at us. I think that, despite the happy(-ish) ending and the hard sci-fi, Mr. Liu reveals himself to be a kind of modern Lovecraftian, one who acutely describes a universe that's at best indifferent and often wants to kill you, though even better in the sense that all we have for Great Old Ones are each other. His pessimism does not reach Landian dead-ends, however, as the ending shows. It's good to know, in the end, that there is a light of mutually assisted survival even at the end of ten-million-year-long and perhaps essentially Chinese tunnels.