DEATH’S END - CIXIN LIU (trans. Ken Liu)

Well, I finally did it, I’ve made it through the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. I’ll cut to the chase, this last volume is by far my favorite. In general, I come to Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever genre for far-out plot and mind-bending concepts. This series of books really ramped it up over the three volumes. The first, THREE-BODY PROBLEM is very grounded and, by comparison, normal seeming, it’s basically a mystery with some sci-fi elements that mostly play out at the end of the book. The second book starts from a more sci-fi place, with a futuristic setting, but really gets exciting and introduces some strange, cool concepts in the last portion of the book. This final novel follows that format as well. It starts fairly normally for a book set hundreds of years in the future. It plays with the same dynamics and ideas that Liu had established in the early novels. However, by the end of this 700 page book, in the last third, it really goes wild and speculates into the far, far future. The book does a good job constantly increasing the scale and scope of what it is talking about and considering until the end when the nature and fate of the universe itself are the main driving plot points. Like the second book, alien weapons are some of the most innovate and interesting concepts the Liu plays with, he clearly has thought about this a lot. Like the Solar Cycle, there is a portion of the book that revolves around interpreting an allegorical story told by a character, which makes me wonder if that series (which, ultimately, for me, remains the Sci-Fi high water mark) is available in Chinese. Like the first, book, this volume includes a single section written from the point of view of an alien civilization which was pretty engaging and interesting. I wish Liu had gone deeper into these parts, they were quite cool but could have been weirder. As for the humans, well, it’s not really what I come to sci-fi for but even so, I found them pretty weak. I appreciate the most driven and psychotic character is a former CIA director but towards the end he acts in a way that seems uncharacteristic. Most of the other characters, including the main one, mostly seem to observe and deep freeze themselves, then thaw out and observe more, they clearly aren’t Liu’s main concern. It was interesting, when considered as a Chinese novel, how un-communistic and unconcerned with politics these novels were. Like the human character, the political questions seemed somewhat half-baked. In the future, the government seems like the US now, to a large extent, with powerful corporations and very wealthy people. There seems to be a much more robust social safety net but Liu seems pretty uninterested in exploring that part of his story. On another note, there seems to be several misogynistic passages and ideas, he frequently notes how feminized and weak future mankind becomes and how a woman is unable to make the hard but necessary choices for our long-term survival. He paints a pretty grim and dog-eat-dog picture of the universe as a whole. Either way, I quite enjoyed it, consistently engaging and surprising.