This is a fan fiction that got the approval of the original author Cixin Liu to be published as a fourth volume of his "Three Body Problem" trilogy. Baoshu, the author is a science fiction writer himself, so it is not overly bad, but it is not very good either. Most of the book (three parts) is characters talking and explaining what happened in the first three books, mostly things that are in the gap years between the different narratives. The explanations are good, though they could have been better. There is really no plot or action in this book, as it is mostly narration. The characters are from the first three books, but sound really boring in this one.
The book being boring is the first issue. The second issue is this whole overarching story, in a pure Christian Metaphor, of the eternal fight between the Master, and his/her nemesis (child?) the Lurker, who destroyed the original Paradise (the 10 dimensional universe) and is trying to destroy and collapse all of this universe into zero dimensions (right now we're at three, so much more work to be done. If I wanted to read Christian moralistic book, I wouldn't choose Science Fiction, though Orson Card has done a pretty good job in his books, much more believable. Of course there is so much talk about Supermembranes on which countless of universes exist, though it seems to me that the author does not understand String Theory very well; mostly from sci-pop point of view.
The third issue I have is with the ending where the author of the original trilogy Cixin Liu is made to be the main protagonist of the trilogy, only reborn in the "next" universe with 5kg of mass missing, so it is a little bit different. For example, Baoshu describes how Mao Zedong ("tall, old man"??? wtf?) decides to build a nuclear power plant instead of the original Red Coast observatory looking for aliens. And it just happens that this is the power plant where Cixin Liu worked while writing the original trilogy. Oh, come on! It is cheesier that a barrel of cheddar!
Anyway, it is interesting take on how the things would have ended, although not exceptionally good, still it is entertaining because it is very easy reading of much lower writing quality and much more simplistic that the originals.
