Paperback
Spanish language
Published Sept. 9, 2018 by Nova.
Death's End (Chinese: 死神永生, pinyin: Sǐshén yǒngshēng) is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. The original Chinese version was published in 2010. Ken Liu translated the English edition in 2016. It was a 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist and winner of 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
This is really a 4.5 for me. As this series has progressed, the writing has been better and better. Once again, the author has been able to mix a vast, epochal scale, with a small, intimate story. It was optimistic at its core, despite being riddled with pessimism.
If you like (extremely) hard sci-fi, this whole series is wonderful.
In between significant and smaller blind spots—including, like Goethe, promoting a stalker's idea of love—is a work of phenomenal imagination. It's the most absorbing book of the three, and excitingly explores ideas of humans in time and space.
The story continues to expand to fill the universe, a feat of imagination worth tagging along with.
Amazing ideas coupled with clichéd stereotypical one dimensional characters. A very disappointing end to the series
An excellent conclusion to one of the best sci-fi trilogies I've read.
The book as a whole was wonderful and I'm so glad I read it, but I do want to mention that as endings go, I felt the ending of the second book more satisfying and conclusive.
Some notes about the ending from my reread (for those who have read the book):
The ending was way more melodramatic than it needed to be, in my opinion. There were a couple easy solutions:
- Presumably AA and Yun Tianming had their own ship (or how did Tianming get there) so couldn't they have flown up to relativistic speeds and gone forward in time to meet the others? I'll admit that timing the deaccelaration would be extremely tricky since they didn't actually know when the others would come out of relativistic speeds, but it could probably be solved with some application …
An excellent conclusion to one of the best sci-fi trilogies I've read.
The book as a whole was wonderful and I'm so glad I read it, but I do want to mention that as endings go, I felt the ending of the second book more satisfying and conclusive.
Some notes about the ending from my reread (for those who have read the book):
The ending was way more melodramatic than it needed to be, in my opinion. There were a couple easy solutions:
- Presumably AA and Yun Tianming had their own ship (or how did Tianming get there) so couldn't they have flown up to relativistic speeds and gone forward in time to meet the others? I'll admit that timing the deaccelaration would be extremely tricky since they didn't actually know when the others would come out of relativistic speeds, but it could probably be solved with some application of the high-tech Trisolaran technology Tianming must inevitably have had. But there's an even simpler solution:
- AA and Tianming should have lived in the mini-universe for a little while. The door could be set to alert them when the others come out of their light-speed travel, and since time seems to flow very differently in the mini-universe they could probably get back together after only a year or maybe even less.
Anyway. I get the point of the ending and why the author chose to do it this way, but it still felt very avoidable and I'm slightly disappointed in it because in the rest of the series, consequences of actions were so well thought out.
Thus ends the rant.
absolutely bonkers, the dragon ball z of hard scifi, a frenzied climb through the most extreme reaches of speculative physics, honestly exhausting and not nearly About Humanity enough but I still devoured it so who am I to judge. the first book is way better
This was the best book in the series. I found it the most "entertaining" and kept me reading it without a break.
What an epic conclusion to a great scifi series!
El derroche de ideas deslunbra y sorprende, CiFi hard pura, pero @liu_cixin cojea en el desarrollo de personajes. Clásico instantáneo aunque no la recomendaría a no habituales del género.
I suppose I don't read a ton of sci-fi, but this is one of the most satisfying payoffs I have ever read in any genre. This book drags a bit in places because Liu Cixin is incredibly meticulous about tying up loose ends and also feels the need to introduce a trillion new ideas, but it's all interesting and worthwhile. Once again, the dense science is balanced out with some very human, very heart-rending stuff. The whole trilogy is one of the best book series I've ever read. Can't say enough good things.
What is it about trilogies? And why is the third installment so often a let down? Maybe it's just me, preferring the middle of a journey over the destination. Anyway, while I had some problems with this book, I enjoyed it immensely.
Cixin Liu wraps up his incredible trilogy offering the reader more of what he served in the first two books: exotic culture, imaginative and mostly plausible use of science, and wild plot twists.
My problem is I think he tried too hard. At 600 pages, this is the longest book in the series. I felt that he really didn't hit his stride until about 200 pages in. He also tried to make use of inserting "excerpts" from a future work as a foreshadowing device. The problem is these weren't used much in the second half for no apparent reason, and more critically, the tone he uses in these …
What is it about trilogies? And why is the third installment so often a let down? Maybe it's just me, preferring the middle of a journey over the destination. Anyway, while I had some problems with this book, I enjoyed it immensely.
Cixin Liu wraps up his incredible trilogy offering the reader more of what he served in the first two books: exotic culture, imaginative and mostly plausible use of science, and wild plot twists.
My problem is I think he tried too hard. At 600 pages, this is the longest book in the series. I felt that he really didn't hit his stride until about 200 pages in. He also tried to make use of inserting "excerpts" from a future work as a foreshadowing device. The problem is these weren't used much in the second half for no apparent reason, and more critically, the tone he uses in these doesn't vary enough from the main narrative. Maybe something is lost in translation.
As always, I enjoyed all the Asian cultural references Liu puts in, though he doesn't come close to the high water mark he reached in The Three Body Problem. On the other hand, there are some "stories within the story" in this book that are absolutely fantastic.
Like the earlier books, Death's End found its way into my head. Liu definitely knows how to make you think, and about concepts truly astronomical in scale. In a Universe billions and billions of years old, how can our few thousand year old civilization pretend to know anything?
Astonishingly beautiful and heartbreaking.
This story will definitely be a sci-fi classic. It is epic in it's scope and really innovative in the storytelling.
I loved it, and enjoyed the scientific background, the matter-of-fact tone in which it is written, the constant surprises and the enigmas hidden throughout. It really is about science and technology, but deep inside it is about humanity and who we are, about our concepts of life, time, the universe and infinity.
The whole trilogy goes into my list of favourite books ever. Highly recommended!
Although I found many of the ideas in it fascinating, I found it very difficult to get into this series. It may have been partly due to the author's writing style, or cultural differences - but I think primarily it was because I didn't find the characters (especially the central characters of the second and third books) engaging. The few characters I did find interesting and wanted to know more about, were all side characters who had little impact on the plot. I don't regret reading this trilogy, however, and others may well find it much more engaging than I did.
Death's End is a fantastic follow-up to The Dark Forest. The pacing is excellent (improves with every book in the series), the scope of the ideas presented to the reader is staggering.
I will not reveal anything at all about the plot, because this series should be experienced by jumping into the books with a clear slate. In fact, I would recommend to the reader that you should not even read the blurb on any of the books.
My complaint with this book, and the reason I'm rating it as 4-star instead of 5, is that the last ~15% of the book meanders unnecessarily (in my opinion) and takes away from the impact that the book could otherwise have had. It feels like Liu Cixin wants to cram every idea he had but could not weave into the story towards the end of the book, in a faux-tie-up-loose-threads-journey-to-the-shire kind of …
Death's End is a fantastic follow-up to The Dark Forest. The pacing is excellent (improves with every book in the series), the scope of the ideas presented to the reader is staggering.
I will not reveal anything at all about the plot, because this series should be experienced by jumping into the books with a clear slate. In fact, I would recommend to the reader that you should not even read the blurb on any of the books.
My complaint with this book, and the reason I'm rating it as 4-star instead of 5, is that the last ~15% of the book meanders unnecessarily (in my opinion) and takes away from the impact that the book could otherwise have had. It feels like Liu Cixin wants to cram every idea he had but could not weave into the story towards the end of the book, in a faux-tie-up-loose-threads-journey-to-the-shire kind of setup.
Having said that, the first ~85% of the book is excellent and a fitting last book in the series.
