This is a really splendid collection of stories, some shorter than other, and I wouldn’t have collected them this way: you have proper sci-fi stories and fairy tales, stories about science (with very little fiction), a story on coal mines and a war tale. But, compared to The Wandering Earth, there is a fil rouge to most of them, and it seems to be beauty and love.
Arsists from other worlds visit the Earth and create either ice sculptures that wreck the planet or clouds of poetry that save it, two people are bound together through the years by the pulsating thoughts of starlight, a man seeks redemption from coal extraction as the last promise made to his dying father.
A must-read, but one of the stories (“Cloud of Poems”) is a sequel to “The Devourer”, and you find it in The Wandering Earth, so I suggest you stick with this order.
I guess now is time to take a deep breath and dive deep into Death’s End, the last massive volume in The Three-Body Problem trilogy. Wish me luck.
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