The Supernova Era

by Liu Cixin

And it is also the greatest fear of humanity as a whole, a terror deeply rooted in human civilization, one that occupies a key place in our spiritual life. Staring into the endless darkness of the cosmos, humanity futilely grasps for a pair of nonexistent hands, but we have so far been unable to find any signs of other intelligent civilizations from our vantage point on a planet that’s no more than a speck of dust in outer space, even as the gods of religion grow ever harder to make out. And therefore our world today is already that of the children in the novel: humanity is an orphan unable to find its parents’ hands, its mind full of terror and confusion even as sparks of naivete and unruliness flicker into flame. . . . ​We may not even be as lucky as those children, since in our course of study there is no one to instruct us. With that in mind, the story told in this novel is a fairly unremarkable one.

Really good afterwords.