Having read the first book in the series almost a year ago I had a surprisingly easy time picking this book up. It relies on very few elements and characters from the last book. That being said it was difficult to get into for a different reason. The book drops you in the middle of tons of concurrent plot lines that, for the most part, are unrelated to each other or the previous books character arcs. You're immediately introduced to a huge number of characters with predominantly Chinese names, including two Zhangs and a Zhuang. Each character gets such a brief introduction that even the character map at the beginning of the book is of little use in connecting names to characters. Making characters and stories more difficult to get a hold of is the quick bursts of focus each plotline is given at the beginning of the book. Each story will be given a quick page or two before switching over to another character. You quickly get a grasp of the individual characters and plots and in the end I like the approach that was taken to introduce such a broad and epic novel. The lack of detailed character intros makes the book feel less juvenile and leaves more open to the imagination regarding the characters appearances, only their features which are truly important to their characters are given to the reader. Overall the opening was probably about as smooth as possible considering the scope of what the author was trying to accomplish, and accomplish it he did. He portrayed a wonderful spectrum of character samples all experiencing the beginning of the Crisis Era from different seats. The story quite naturally and believably spans centuries. This book is a near perfect exploration of the universe Cixin created in his first entry to the series. I personally felt a deep investment in what happened to humanity and what happened to the main characters in the story. It was a perfect roller coaster of my faith as a reader in the outcome for the Earth and its inhabitants. I couldn't have asked for a better sequel. I did feel that I needed to suspend my disbelief a bit more than I did in the first novel but the scale is so much larger in this book and he has to dive more into the technology of the future and of alien races.
