by Baoshu
First published 2020
Yun Tianming was dying of cancer when he made a choice that should have ended everything. Instead, his body was flash frozen and fired into space, straight toward the Trisolaran First Fleet. What followed were decades of capture and torture that eventually broke him. To spare Earth from total annihilation, he helped the Trisolarans subjugate his own species. The aliens rewarded him with a cloned body, and he spent an enormous stretch of time living as a traitor, cut off from humanity. Now, near the end of even that long exile, something new finds him. A consciousness called The Spirit offers him yet another body and a new mission: fight an entity threatening the entire universe. Yun has been used before. He knows what it feels like to be a tool in someone else's war. This time he refuses to follow anyone else's script. Set in the universe of Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem trilogy and published with Liu's support, Baoshu's novel follows one man deciding, after a lifetime of compromise and survival, what he actually owes the future.
Genres: science-fiction, space-opera, adult-fiction, epic, hard-science-fiction
Vibes: dark, epic, introspective, morally-complex, thought-provoking
Tropes: forced-alliance, redemption-arc, reluctant-hero, second-chance
Setting: Earth, Space, Trisolaran First Fleet
Period: Far Future
283 pages · Paperback · Tor Books
Content warnings: terminal-illness, torture, war