Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning (球状闪电 - Qiúzhuàng shǎndiàn) by Liu Cixin is a hard science fiction novel that loosely leads up to the author's later Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu apparently wrote Ball Lightning while thinking he was about to die to liver cancer he was misdiagnosed with. That kind of explains the heavily philosophical prologue and I suppose the book's ending, which I didn't like all that much due to it leaning so much on metaphysical quantum nonsense.

Death's End

死神永生 (Sǐshén yǒngshēng), the final volume of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy has a slightly different name in English than it has in Finnish. Google translate says the squiggles mean 'death immortality' so I'm not sure which is more accurate: Death's End or Kuolema on ikuinen ('death is eternal', or maybe 'death is forever' like how one James Bond novel by John Gardner is titled and translated). A character in the novel does say death to be the only lighthouse that is always lit so I'm kind of favoring the Finnish name.

The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest (黑暗森林 / Hēi'àn sēnlín) is the second novel in Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The Three-Body Problem was a good read but I think this one had even more deliberation put into it, making it feel like an important work of science fiction, mainly because of it coining cosmic sociology. The sole thing I didn't like in the novel was the viewpoint of a Chinese navy officer Zhang Beihai whom I thought boring and the little payoff at the end not worth it for the time spent on following him.

The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem (三体 / sān tǐ) is a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin. It was recommended to me on Reddit when I mentioned Blindsight by Peter Watts. The redditor in question said Blindsight had been the most significant scifi book they had read until The Three-Body Problem trilogy -- or Remembrance of Earth's Past as it's officially called. That was enough of a recommendation for me to check it out.