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Dune is often described as being about oil [1]. Similarly, TBP is mostly about Chinese nationalism and the politics involved with being economically intertwined with the United States while retaining an opportunistic military posture.

The message of TBP is hopeful in that the US and China are ultimately locked together against a universe of unknowns.

It totally goes off the deep end there at the end though, but this would be a hard book to write while living in China. The CPC wouldn't allow this kind of propaganda to be sold to the West if it didn't basically follow their party line. I mean, the author basically telegraphs this situation with the subplot about how the Terrans learn how FTL travel works.

[1] https://futurism.media/dune-and-oil-the-real-world-influence...

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Ok, seen in that light it makes a bit more sense.

The chapters where people are treated basically like grass, letting them dry out when conditions are unfavorable, and just hydrating them back to life when things get better - that's some seriously puke-inducing allegory. That's a world I would absolutely refuse to live in. Something is seriously wrong with a universe that produces that kind of outcome.

The Trisolarian world was definitely shitty, and it's pretty improbable that life would manage to thrive there, but I thought it was still interesting.

My problem with those novels shows up anywhere someone uses "pure logic" to solve some problem, but the logic is totally insane and nobody ever calls them on it. In fact the entire universe follows the same insane logic for some reason, and it dooms the whole place.

It does get kind of funny near the end when the author decides that the big crunch is going to happen after all. But then all of the alien races have stolen too much of the mass of the universe to hide in their own little pocket universes so it won't happen. The protagonists at that point return their mass to the universe, but given the logic of the rest of the series there is no chance that the alien races will do that, the universe remains doomed.

Well, you know, they're aliens. The books never describe what they actually look like but you can well imagine that they are some kind of insect like creatures which would be horrifying to us.

For many life forms even on Earth, going into stasis during difficult times is a completely normal occurence.

The books actually do describe the aliens. They look like the aliens from "Mars Attacks" [1], except their brains are bioluminescent and the patterns displayed involuntarily reveal their thoughts.

[1] http://cdn3.bigcommerce.com/s-sby4jv/product_images/uploaded...

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