Review of The Redemption of Time by Baoshu (the fourth book in the Three-Body Problem series).

The Redemption of Time is an extension of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Three-Body Problem) trilogy by Cixin Liu. It started off as fanfiction by author Baoshu (the pen name of Li Jun). He was approached by publishers, and with Cixin Liu’s blessing, a novel was published. Baoshu has written three other novels and won six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. He is no ordinary writer of fanfiction. 

The novel takes up the story of Yun Tianming. He was a character in the Three Body Problem who was dying from cancer and had his brain placed into a probe and launched into space to meet the Trisolaran invasion fleet. It was assumed that the Trisolarans would use their superior technology to revive him and communicate with him. This would give Tianming the opportunity to show the Trisolarans that humanity was not a threat. In the original novel the probe goes off course and is assumed to have failed to reach the fleet.

In The Redemption of Time, the Trisolarans send a ship from their fleet to intercept the probe and bring Yun Tianming’s brain onboard. Yun Tianming is brought back to life in a virtual world where he interacts with the Trisolarans.   

The first half of the novel is mostly one of filling in the gaps of what happened to Yun Tianming during the events of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Those who read the trilogy should remember that he played a pivotal part in the series when he contacted Cheng Xin and told her some very cryptic fairy tales. We learn the background of those fairy tales. We also learn of other times where Yun Tianming influenced what was happening in the war between humanity and the Trisolarans. A reader should find these revelations entertaining and of great interest.

The second half of the novel is more about Yun Tianming’s own adventures. He is recruited by the god like Spirit to stop the also god like Lurker from collapsing the universe into one dimension. At least that is what Yun Tianming thinks at first. The science fiction concepts in this section appear to be very much fantasy and can be hard to grasp. They are similar to the dimension collapsing ideas in the last book of the original trilogy.

The prose in the first part of the novel is very much in a telling mode, as Yun Tianming tells the tale of what happened to him to one of the other original characters of the series. The writing in the second part of the novel is more of a showing narrative which is very high in concepts. A section where a different alien race is under attack by the Lurker is more easily readable. A reader could spend hours back-tracking and trying to get a better grasp of the concepts or just continue reading with a general gist of the ideas.

This is not a stand-alone novel. A reader would have had to read the original trilogy to have an idea of the meaning of the events that happen in The Redemption of Time. It is a novel for fans of the original trilogy who have speculated on the fate of Yun Tianming. It is not one for the casual science fiction reader.