Opens in the Cultural Revolution with a physicist watching her father beaten to death, and the decision she makes decades later follows directly from that scene.
The science fiction is genuinely hard. A three-sun system with unpredictable orbits, a civilisation that keeps being destroyed by it, and a game that turns out to be a recruitment exercise.
The characters are thin and the ideas are not, which is a trade I will take. The central question, whether contact is worth the risk when you cannot know the intentions of what answers, is handled with more rigour than most of the genre manages.
Read August 2016. I went back through it again in 2021 before finally finishing the trilogy.
