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Finished Death's End by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu (no relation), 3rd in his Remembrance of Earth's Past aka Three-Body trilogy. This was somewhat slow to get into at first, since the setup is pretty dense and I'd forgotten a large portion of what had actually happened in the previous volumes, but got back up to speed soon enough.
Like the previous in the series, this one went on rather unexpected tangents that were surprising in the best way, with a satisfying exploration and further extrapolation of things that were set up in the prior installments as well as in this one. I'm not sure whether it's an artifact of the translation or not (I suspect not, as hard sf tends to be somewhat skimpy in this area), but even though we spent a lot of time with certain characters, they didn't feel all that well-developed on a character level, rather than being more of a series of traits and reactions needed to play out the story.
But that's a minor quibble, and the richness of the ideas and execution more than made up for it, even if some of the future civilization glimpses were perhaps not conveyed all that plausibly. That said, there seemed a good depiction of the various factions and schisms and shifts in political authority and social development taking place over time. I especially liked the use of false document technique with the excerpts from future books describing what had happen in the past, and the faux-fairy tales.
Highly recommended, as an interesting look into possible human reaction to any number of spoilery things which challenge the notions of the survival of humanity not simply in a physical sense of the species, but also in the spiritual sense of what makes us human, from a viewpoint somewhat different from most western sf to date. Apparently the popularity of this has influenced Tor in putting out an anthology of translated Chinese science fiction stories (and Clarkesworld has already been publishing translated stories from various languages for some time now), which I'll have to take a look at.
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