Death’s End by Cixin Liu is the final book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. In a series that got extremely popular due it making it on President Obama’s recommendation list, we get to finally see to the fate of the human civilization and how they fare against the Trisolarans. With the Dark Forest theory enacted, will the Trisolarans play nice with humans on Earth or will they call their bluff? If I could give Death’s End more than five stars in my review, I’d gladly do it. It surpassed every expectation I had and more importantly, it reminds me of how fun it is to read a hardcore science fiction series from start to end and actually understand more than 80% of it!
Some time has passed since I finished The Dark Forest and so I had to find a nice overall recap of the events leading up to Death’s End. I’m glad I did that because it brought back so many memories of the previous two books. This time around in Death’s End, we follow in the footsteps of Cheng Xin, a brilliant scientist that will eventually play a big role in human civilization’s existence in the future. We get to journey with her through hundreds and thousands of years to witness how humans have advanced over the era’s to better protect themselves from not just the Trisolarans but from other unknown entities in the wide universe as well. During my read of Death’s End, I was really immersed with both the story and the characters. Page after page did everything flowed so smoothly!
As with the previous two books in the series, there are going to be many things that will just fly over our heads. However, I felt that the translator did a really good job of at least explaining the majority of it so that the readers at least can somehow picture it. To me that’s good enough. If the intent was to make the human civilization look small and tiny when compared to the overall nature of the universe, I’d say he’s done a good job! Anytime we’re dealing with hardcore science fiction there will bound to be questions that you’ll come up with. Because the technology being developed by the humans were so much more advanced than what we know of today, many of the questions I found myself asking dealt with if humans has the means to do variable X, then couldn’t they just have done Y instead of action Z?
Needless to say, Death’s End is one heck of an addicting story. I am glad the series ended at just three books instead of the author dragging things on and milking the series further. The conclusion was satisfactory although I wished certain things and events were better explained. As it is, it probably doesn’t matter once I thought about it as that was probably what the author intended. Not everything can be explained in the grand scheme of things. When Earth and human civilization can be considered just a remote speck of dust in the greater universe, what can really matter in the end when there are way more advanced lifeforms out there with technology that we can’t even fathom or imagine?
My only wish now is that this trilogy gets turned into a TV series either through Amazon or Netflix.
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