Reading the second book of the "remembrance of earth's past" trilogy, "The dark forest". I must say all other books i have read in the last years really are getting pale in comparison, the idea and concept of this is just grand. Most characters are not very well developed, and you seldom feel a real sympathy, but then you do not need to, it is all about telling the story.
And there's the third book still to read, *looking forward*.
#5 member of the wallfacer project
A female chinese technician who has been spared from being killed during Mao's "cultural revolution", is forced to work in an astrophysical facility in the 1960ies, like western SETI, being the chinese version and a military facility researching the use of strong radio waves as weapons. They are sending also out messages into space, not expecting an answer. The technician soon discovers that sending radio messages into space will take decades to get to the nearest star system, and the signal is also much too weak. While using some of the restricted time to prove some own solar theories, she finds a way to use one of the sun's atmosphere shells as an amplifier, sending one short string of information.
Decades later an incoming answer is accidentally being found, advising to better stop messaging. Instead the technician, having seen the brutality of communist rule in China and now living in the time of the late cold war, sends an invitation with the request to stop mankind from destroying itself.
This all is being told along with other story strings, about a computer game called "The three body problem". The latter is exactly the problem the aliens have with their triple suns and their planet, but the best human scientists have to give up on a solution because the problem is virtually unsolvable. Which is why the aliens decide to leave their chaotic planet, and evacuate to earth. The voyage will last 450 years, the same time the earth has to prepare for the invasion.
At the time of first radio contact in the 1950ies, humanity is technologically behind the "aliens", though the latter fear that earth will be superior in some 200 years. But the aliens have some aces up their sleeve, they are able to block earth's scientists to transgress a certain line of scientific evolution and development with their "sophons", proton-sized supercomputers sent for espionage and to halt scientific progress on Earth.. and all that is being written, stored or spoken, can be immediately read. A real problem..