A review of the heavy science-fiction novel “Death’s End” by Cixin Liu
Following “The Three-Body Problem” and “The Dark Forest”, this is the third and final novel in the ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy by the noted Chinese science fiction writer. It was first published in Chinese in 2010 and then in English in 2016. It was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel and winner of the 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
While most of the first novel is set in a few decades of the near future and concerned the threat of an invasion of Earth by a Trisolar civilisation, most of the second novel is set in the first 20 years of the so-called Crisis Era, while the last third is set some two centuries on and describes an encounter between Earth’s new, massive star fleet and an advance probe from the Trisolarians.
In this huge third novel, we return to the Crisis Era for around 100 pages, then most of the book (some 550 pages) takes us through four other eras spanning another two centuries, before finally the narrative makes some incredible leaps 17 billion years and then another 10 billion years into the future.
This is a very readable novel with lots of relatively short chapters, switching between different characters, various time zones and alternate parts of the universe. Also the work is endlessly imaginative: we have space cities and anti-matter bullets; we have travel at light speed, reductions in the speed of light, and even the notions of ‘time vacuum’ and ‘time dilation’; and we have astronauts entering four-dimensional space, whole planets folding from three- into two-dimensional space, and a universe which originally had ten dimensions.
However, this third book in the series is too repetitive and too long – it runs to 721 pages, bringing the total length of the trilogy to just short of 1700 pages. I was with Cixin Liu for the first four centuries of his fantastic tale, but then he lost me and I found the ending far too weak.