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?