Death's End

16 Apr, 2025

I’ve finally finished the Rememberance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and boy was it fantastic. Similar to my last review post, I’ll start with some basic thoughts before getting spoiler heavy.

As I've mentioned in the past - Cixin Liu's writing is full of such vivid descriptions of both technology and scenery, it's so easy to immerse myself in his worlds and I find that to be one of the best parts of reading fiction. There were a few times in this book where I felt his imagined future was a bit more extreme than I could believe, but it surprisingly didn't break my immersion as much as one would expect.

When I initially started reading this, I had mentioned to Amin that I wasn't a fan of the ending of The Dark Forest and he mentioned I may prefer this one as it ties up some loose ends. I definitely want to note that it did satisfy most of my questions throughout the trilogy and was a much more solid finish than the previous entry.

I do wish there was a bit more added to the story, at times my own imagination is a bit too dull to come up with my own interpretations of endings which this one requires a bit of. But overall, it was fantastic from beginning to end.

I give Death’s End by Cixin Liu a 4.75/5 stars, and call it a fantastic end to a wonderful trilogy all around.

Spoilers beyond this point!

Cheng Xin is such an interesting character and reminded me a lot of the pre-Wallfacer Luo Ji, who I wish we'd seen a lot more of. I think her being a kind of “beacon of hope” throughout the book was a nice change of pace, although at times it felt a bit ridiculous for the circumstances.

Yun Tiangming was also such an interesting character that I wish we knew more about. I’d really love to read a story covering his life from the departure of the Staircase Project through his time on Planet Blue, but I expect this will just be left up to interpretation for the most part unfortunately. I immediately thought upon reading it that his final days with AA would make a fantastic spin-off book, but I assume that'll never come to life.

I also wanted to make a note, I think it was really interesting the sort of parallel I saw between "A Past Outside of Time" and the writings of Princess Irulan that start off most Dune chapters. It is really an interesting way to provide more information to the reader without it being so “in your face.” Also reminds me I need to go finish reading Dune one of these days…

On the ending: as strong as I understand the desire to be to see the universe as it progressed, I also see Guan Yifan’s point of view that if the universe is that particular then the amount of mini-universes keeping their matter would probably cause things to collapse no matter what. The possibility of a universe that “picky” still surviving under the circumstances feels infinitesimally small. Still, I think the better reaction would be to look into slowing down the relative time movement inside the mini-universe - and then have the universe “disassemble itself” after your death. Maybe this is a selfish take, but with the difficulty they had finding a suitable world to live on it seems like they’ve stepped out of an almost utopia to die for a universe that may still cease to exist despite their efforts. Although maybe I should look at it from a different lens, and the perspective that it would be hard to predict how you'd act if you suddenly got slingshot tens of millions of years into the future.

This book really makes you think a lot about the future, and how surprisingly realistic the future presented here seems¹. I've really been enjoying a lot of more philosophical fiction lately - this and Severance have been fascinating to ponder over. Once again, I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it to any and all science fiction fans.

#'Books'