Book Review: "Death's End" by Cixin Liu
*Spoiler alert!*
As I come to the closing of the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”
trilogy, there’s a part of me that’s still left in the epic space opera penned
by Cixin Liu.
Among those who have hopped and skipped across the timeline
of events in the past three books, is aerospace engineer Chang Xin, who is
awakened in the “Deterrence Era” after being put under hibernation in our
present (the 21st century). She was part of a secret program known
as the Staircase Project that sent an emissary of humanity on a probe to meet
the Trisolaran fleet. Upon her awakening, she is disappointed to learn that no
one has heard anything back from the Trisolarans about coming upon such a
probe.
This whole series has been about humanity leaving Earth to
explore the Solar System and beyond and coming to learn that the universe is a
hostile “dark forest” in which there are players big and small warring it out
for survival.
Chang Xin unwittingly finds herself at the center of the
ongoing Trisolaran-Earth conflict and ends up in the position of making choices
that may determine the fate of both humanity and Trisolaris alike.
Much was made about the “sword holder,” previously Luo Ji,
who ended The Dark Forest by building a cosmic system of mutually
assured destruction to ward off the Trisolaran invasion. Chang Xin is elected
to be his successor, and things immediately degenerate into chaos. (Chang Xin makes the choice to not send the signal that would reveal the location
of Trisolaris and, indirectly, Earth, when Trisolaris capitalizes on the
transition of power to resume their Earth invasion and human extermination
campaign.)
I really felt for Chang Xin, who is
symbolic of humanity as a whole realizing that they are out-gunned by the rest
of the universe. (Who doesn’t love an underdog, David vs. Goliath story?)
Elsewhere, outside of the solar
system, an Earth fleet ship known as Gravity ends up releasing the
signal that dooms both worlds. The Trisolarans scatter after their planet is
destroyed by an unknown civilization and humanity is left realizing they are up
against a much more powerful foe than the Trisolarans. After all, they have
witnessed distant stars and planets being destroyed.
Their plan for surviving such a solar strike? Evacuating most of
humanity to space cities in the orbits of the outer planets, like Jupiter and Saturn.
Humanity ends up putting all its
metaphorical eggs in the basket of the “bunker” plan of space cities, and light-speed
ships are blackballed and taboo as potentially revealing the location of the
solar system and perhaps bumping up the timeline for a solar strike. Not to
mention affording such ships would be the province of the wealthy, leading to an
“inequality of death,” in which those with the means are more likely to survive
an apocalypse than many ordinary people.
But little did humanity know, a
low-level worker in an advanced civilization flags Earth’s solar system for destruction
and sends a weapon to annihilate the solar system via collapsing it into two
dimensions. (I didn’t see that one coming, honestly. The physics-bending involved
broke my brain.)
“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
Chang Xin and her friend, A. A., are
the only survivors of the strike on the solar system. Turns out their ship was
one of a very few light-speed ships made in secret.
Riddled with guilt for her role in
delaying light-speed research that could’ve helped more of humanity to escape,
Chang Xin is thrust further into a universe which becomes more and more alien
and frightening as it was awe-inspiring. Liu throws readers into a universe-wide
perspective on the rise and fall of whole civilizations and reveals a universe
in which various societies fighting for survival weaponize the very laws of physics
themselves and threaten the existence of the very cosmos they were born into.
“And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one. The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”
So many grand ideas about the universe are crammed into this series, especially in this third volume. Yet, Liu has pulled it off and more, creating memorable, complex, and morally-gray characters that we nonetheless can relate to.
My mind has been blown by this trilogy, and I highly recommend Liu’s “Remembrance
of Earth’s Past” series to anyone who enjoys similar work by Isaac Asimov and
Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Happy reading!
--BookOwl
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