Take a photo of a barcode or cover
chris_chester 's review for:
Death's End
by Cixin Liu
This was definitely the best bit of hard science fiction I've read in a long time. Even by the standards of a trilogy that was critically-lauded for its big ideas, this finale is fittingly huge.
Three-Body Problem gave us one of the best depictions of successful SETI seen since Carl Sagan and Contact. The Dark Forest built on that foundation and tried to extrapolate from there, making some Asimov-scale leaps as human accepts, copes with, and tries to build on a universe in which the only answer to the Fermi Paradox is cynicism.
Death's End goes even farther. If the universe is a dark forest and species have to eliminate all signs of competition, how would super-intelligent beings police that world and what possible chance does humanity have?
There are too many smaller ideas for me to mention, but my favorite thread had to do with laws of physics. Liu Cixin presents the idea that, much in the same way that life has fundamentally altered the chemistry of the Earth to better suit it, life (or at least, non-entropic entitites) actually changes the very laws of nature to suit its purposes.
As it stands, the purpose to which life is bending the laws of nature is protect itself from other light. In the world of Death's End, beings change the very speed of light in places to hide themselves or entrap their enemies. They fling portals that collapse whole solar systems into lower dimensions at one another, for the simple transgression of making oneself known.
It's further suggested that this has already happened. Maybe the speed of light was once faster -- perhaps even infinite. And life existed on higher dimensions, perhaps as many as ten. But through the adoption of the dark forest protocol, life knocked itself out of this relatively Edenic state for the sake of self-preservation.
It's not just that these ideas are big in scope -- both in terms of space and time. It's that they're thought through so thoroughly. I don't always agree with the choices he envisions for humanity, but I appreciate how he seems to have really explored all the directions those choices can take them. When you're a nerd for whom casually thinking of the universe and infinity is as close as you get to spirituality, this is a very satisfying thing.
I will say that the author was never able to totally square away his problems with female characters. Dark Forest in particular was bad with this, as the only main female character was one that a man more or less wished for out of a dream? Or something? It wasn't great. The main character and her sidekick here are were both women. And the main character at least makes a couple of decisions... that I guess would cynically be termed women's decisions? Decisions that the author directly describes as coming from a place of emotion instead of cold rationality.
The foil for the main character, interestingly enough, is a grizzled American intelligence official I think from the CIA. He is sort of the archetypal "rational man," in the very American "preemptive strike" kind of way. A real 'will to power' kind of dude and perhaps an interesting symptom of how the United States is perceived in China.
In any case, at three of the main turnings in the book, the female character makes "motherly" decisions that, while done out of love for the human race, wind up costing us dearly. It's not totally clear what Cixin Liu is asking us to think about this. It suggests that humanity is special, but it definitely isn't a net positive. And I don't think that's going to please feminist critics of this series.
But I digress. This is hard science fiction. You show up for the ideas, not the excellent character development. This was probably the best work of the series and it was a really terrific read as a whole.
Three-Body Problem gave us one of the best depictions of successful SETI seen since Carl Sagan and Contact. The Dark Forest built on that foundation and tried to extrapolate from there, making some Asimov-scale leaps as human accepts, copes with, and tries to build on a universe in which the only answer to the Fermi Paradox is cynicism.
Death's End goes even farther. If the universe is a dark forest and species have to eliminate all signs of competition, how would super-intelligent beings police that world and what possible chance does humanity have?
Spoiler
There are too many smaller ideas for me to mention, but my favorite thread had to do with laws of physics. Liu Cixin presents the idea that, much in the same way that life has fundamentally altered the chemistry of the Earth to better suit it, life (or at least, non-entropic entitites) actually changes the very laws of nature to suit its purposes.
As it stands, the purpose to which life is bending the laws of nature is protect itself from other light. In the world of Death's End, beings change the very speed of light in places to hide themselves or entrap their enemies. They fling portals that collapse whole solar systems into lower dimensions at one another, for the simple transgression of making oneself known.
It's further suggested that this has already happened. Maybe the speed of light was once faster -- perhaps even infinite. And life existed on higher dimensions, perhaps as many as ten. But through the adoption of the dark forest protocol, life knocked itself out of this relatively Edenic state for the sake of self-preservation.
It's not just that these ideas are big in scope -- both in terms of space and time. It's that they're thought through so thoroughly. I don't always agree with the choices he envisions for humanity, but I appreciate how he seems to have really explored all the directions those choices can take them. When you're a nerd for whom casually thinking of the universe and infinity is as close as you get to spirituality, this is a very satisfying thing.
I will say that the author was never able to totally square away his problems with female characters. Dark Forest in particular was bad with this, as the only main female character was one that a man more or less wished for out of a dream? Or something? It wasn't great. The main character and her sidekick here are were both women. And the main character at least makes a couple of decisions... that I guess would cynically be termed women's decisions? Decisions that the author directly describes as coming from a place of emotion instead of cold rationality.
The foil for the main character, interestingly enough, is a grizzled American intelligence official I think from the CIA. He is sort of the archetypal "rational man," in the very American "preemptive strike" kind of way. A real 'will to power' kind of dude and perhaps an interesting symptom of how the United States is perceived in China.
In any case, at three of the main turnings in the book, the female character makes "motherly" decisions that, while done out of love for the human race, wind up costing us dearly. It's not totally clear what Cixin Liu is asking us to think about this. It suggests that humanity is special, but it definitely isn't a net positive. And I don't think that's going to please feminist critics of this series.
But I digress. This is hard science fiction. You show up for the ideas, not the excellent character development. This was probably the best work of the series and it was a really terrific read as a whole.