Received as a birthday present

Set against the backdrop of China''s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

This book was recommended to me by a colleague. I haven't read a lot of science fiction recently so it was fun to get back in to the genre. The book started out quite well and I was intrigued by the premise. It's always interesting to me how one seemingly inconspicuous event can lead to such a massive change, in this case one that impacts the entire world.

The characters were not likable and I had trouble keeping them straight at the beginning of the book. I think part of that was because they skipped forward/backward in time and it took me a while to catch up with where we were. There seemed to be little consequences for criminal activities, which annoyed me.

Despite a good start and interesting build up to contact with another world, the ending was a bit disappointing to me. It got overly and unnecessarily scientific and started dragging because of it. I will still try the next in the series and I've heard there's a TV show coming that I'll probably tune in to.

I ended up selling this on FB marketplace and while it has the bookcrossing ID in the front cover, there's nothing to indicate what that means so this book is probably lost to the system forever.