Book Review: Death’s End by Cixin Liu, the final book in the Three Body Trilogy.

In my posts of 30Aug2017 and 2May2018 I reviewed the first two installments of Chinese Author Cixin Liu’s trilogy. Part one was ‘The Three Body Problem’ where astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, a victim of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution who has come to hate humanity, invites an alien race inhabiting the Alpha Centauri system to come and conquer Earth. The aliens are called Trisolarans and since their ship’s are only capable of one percent of the speed of light it will take over 400 years to reach our solar system.

In the second book of the trilogy ‘The Dark Forest’, astronomer Luo Ji realizes that the Universe is an eternal battleground where intelligent species hide as best they can to escape being destroyed by some other intelligence, hence the ‘Dark Forest’. Luo Ji uses this knowledge to force the Trisolarans into a Mexican standoff, ‘If you try to invade us we’ll announce your coordinates to the entire Galaxy and someone out there will destroy you pretty quickly’. The novel ends with the Trisolarans agreeing to a truce.

The third novel, ‘Death’s End’ actually begins in the year 1453 C.E. with the Turkish army about to conquer Constantinople. A witch tells Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX that she can kill the Sultan with her magic. To test her the Emperor commands her to kill a condemned prisoner even while he is under constant guard. When the prisoner magically falls down dead in front of the guards and the witch brings the Emperor the man’s brain even though his head is completely untouched she is ordered to assassinate the Turkish Sultan. Two days later she announces that her magic has failed and she no longer has any power so she is executed even as the Turkish army breaks into the city.

I when into some detail on this initial section of ‘Death’s End’ because I succeeded in figuring out what the witch’s power was and I had a good idea how it was going to effect the rest of the novel. See if you can figure it out as well!

The main character in ‘Death’s End’ is aerospace engineer Cheng Xin. Cheng is the person who has been selected to replace Luo Ji as the ‘Swordholder’, the person holding the switch that if pressed will broadcast the position of the Trisolarans to the dark forest. Since making such an announcement would not only give away the position of the Trisolarans but of Humanity as well it would lead to the mutual destruction of both civilizations.

It’s during the hand-off that the Trisolarans attempt to break the deadlock but I think I’ll forego any more spoilers. Let’s just say that some members of both species do survive to build new civilizations.

If the first two novels of the trilogy were inventive and imaginative ‘Death’s end’ squares the breathtaking vision of a Universe beyond the imagination. That’s not quite a good thing however, for in his rush to include ideas like mini-Universes, weaponized dimensions and space curvature as a way to both achieve lightspeed and alter the speed of light Cixin Liu leaves a lot of loose threads behind in his story. Now every novel has a few question left unanswered at the end but “Death’s End’ just has too many. At the end I was left asking a lot of, ‘well what about?’ and ‘what happened to?’

Also, if Cixin Liu wanted to show off his imagination he could have tried actually describing what the Trisolarans looked like! The three novels are more than a combined 1500 pages but we never get to see the bad guys! Now I know how difficult it can be to describe really alien creatures, in fact I’m halfway through a novel with very alien intelligences in it and I’m nowhere near satisfied with my descriptions so far. I can see the aliens in my head but getting that image onto paper is really tough!

Nevertheless Cixin Liu needed to try. At the end of ‘The Three Body Problem’ I accepted that we hadn’t seen the Trisolarans yet, there fleet is still 400 years away after all. Nevertheless I expected to see them in ‘The Dark Forest’. I have to admit by the end of ‘Death’s End’ I kinda felt cheated.

Nevertheless, ‘Death’s End’ was a real eye opener, a wild ride through a fantastic Universe that will stick in your mind and leave you thinking and wondering for days. In all the ‘Three Body Trilogy’ was some of the best science fiction I’ve read in quite a few years and I hope to soon read some more of Cixin Liu’s work.