A review by stephen_coulon
Death's End by Cixin Liu

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Liu Cixin’s final installment of his groundbreaking Remembrance of Earth’s Past science fiction trilogy. This one is a real mess. The first two installments of the series, The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest, while complex and filled with disparate ideas were held together by a good sense of plot and decent character development, especially for hard science fiction. In Death’s End though the author seems to have taken every undeveloped idea in his notebook and dumped them into the second half of the book. The ideas are great ideas, creative and anomalous, but there’s just too many of them jammed in with no regard to plot and little connection to theme. I still liked the book, but more as a glimpse into Cixin’s ideas rather than as a novel. It’s puzzling why he didn’t just save half of the ideas as central speculations for other novels – he’s got at least four or five more books of materials here. If you read the first two in the series it’s pretty unavoidable to finish the third as the overarching plot does come to an end, but don’t expect the sharp storytelling from his other work.