Death's End

By: Cixin Liu, Ken Liu - translator

Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan

Soon to be a Netflix original series!

“The War of the Worlds for the 21st century...packed with a sense of wonder.” (Wall Street Journal)

The New York Times best-selling conclusion to a tour de force near-future adventure trilogy from China's best-selling and beloved science fiction writer.

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking listeners got their first chance to hear China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It was also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now this epic trilogy concludes with Death's End.

Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early 21st century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy:

The Three-Body Problem

The Dark Forest

Death's End

Other books:

Ball Lightning Supernova Era

To Hold Up The Sky (forthcoming)

©2010 Cixin Liu (P)2016 Macmillan Audio

The perfect finish for the series

If you could sum up Death's End in three words, what would they be?

The perfect end.

What other book might you compare Death's End to and why?

Seveneves in the scope of it.

What does P. J. Ochlan bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He bridges the gap between the Chinese source material and the English translation, and does female voices and characters seamlessly.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes!

Great Sci Fi and good physics. a recommended read

Great Sci Fi and good physics. a recommended read it takes time to build so be patient as the payoff is worth it.

best hard sci find in my lifetime

this is the best cosmological fiction you'll likely ever read. the cross cultural references are innumerably great & the "holy s**t" moments that that might happen are real & compelling.

Annoyed by the main character

Despite the story being quite interesting, the main character is an annoying person that keeps on making shortsighted, fatalistic decisions to the detriment of all humanity. I disliked her quite a lot and it made the story pretty hard to keep up with.

mind expanding in a way that haunts you

Opens doors of thought and possibilities unimagined; it left me wondering whats really out there amd where we might go

Stunning!

No amount of words can do this series justice. It is epic, engaging, mind-expanding, thoughtful and utterly inspiring. It was truly a pleasure to listen to!

Byfar the most thoughtful Scifi trilogy in history

There has never been, nor will ever be, a more human, thoughtful Sci Fi novel in history or the future. A triumphant analysis of human nature.

best book in a very long time

I view the world differently after reading the book. the author has imaginations that I've never seen before

Book 2 is the best

Book 2 will blow your mind. Book 1 was good. But the ending of book 3 was sort of unsatisfying.

Still worth reading if you like sci-fi

Flawed Masterpiece

Death's End is a wondrous and heartbreaking end to the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. It is grand in several senses of the word. It is an odyssey and a tragedy. It is the best of the series, The Three-Body Problem being a respectable but distant second.

On occasions*(see down below) Cixin Liu, reaches for such heights that Death's End might be not only one of the best of its genre, but also one of the best tales ever told. It is touching. It is thought-provoking. It is depressing and uplifting. It is a masterpiece.

It is, nonetheless, flawed in forgivable ways. The last chapters are compressed, perhaps because at its current length it was already too long to be a single book. But I found myself wondering what happened to certain characters**. Perhaps not knowing their story was a calculated move on Liu's part. Perhaps having a nice bow on everything would have taken away from the gut-wrenching tragic tone. A bigger problem is the final decisions of two main characters***. One of them is incredibly out of character and it feels like a borderline plot convenience. The second one is in-character, but underdeveloped and makes you dislike the character for the wrong reasons. It would have benefited from being explained and framed better. As it happens in the story, it just gives the impression that the person who made it is an irredeemable idiot.

Still, when Liu succeeds, he has hardly any match. The marvels of his story far outshine its flaws. This is a must read for sci-fi fans and those who ponder life and death.

SPOILERS:

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* The three fairy tales, Singer firing the dual vector projectile, and the end of the Solar System

** Galactic Humans and Trisolarans

*** Thomas Wade giving up was out of character. It could have been circumvented with a different arc going to the same outcome, or by introducing a few intervening chapters during the last hibernation laying the grounds for his exhaustion.

Cheng Xin deciding to return her pocket universe's mass to the Great Universe came across as extremely unintelligent. After all that game theory and Xin witnessing the catastrophic consequences of her own passivity and pacifism, I would have at least expected a discussion of the futility of returning the mass. After all, those who survived in pocket universes are a self-selecting population: they are mostly---but not entirely---those who would like to survive above all else. So, Xin herself is an unrepresentative member of the inhabitants of pocket universes. Believing that the idea that enough universes will return their mass to the Great Universe to prevent the Big Rip is beyond naive. There was a big lost opportunity here, in my opinion. Liu could have made all that explicit, and then Xin could have returned her mass to the great universe anyway, as a hopeless act of self-sacrifice. But it didn't happen that way. The ending felt half-baked and as if it were an afterthought.