Kevin reviewed Death's End by Liu Cixin
End of the line
4 stars
Content warning Some references to other works may hint at spoilers
I couldn't resist and had to finish my binge of the series. This one is truly big, spanning billions of years and tying together many themes and concepts. Cixin Liu will casually cover a topic that in other works would constitute the entirety of the novel, but he does it as a throwaway chapter. Well, not throwaway, but in some cases a topic is introduced, and closed out so quickly that in many cases, the reader is left wanting more or perhaps thinking to themself "was this topic so obvious that the author didn't deem it worthy of covering further?"
The beginning was very confusing and it does seem like this was a dumping ground for some of the conceptual content that had been created while doing some world-building. After about the first quarter of the book, the threads come together and the story really gets going. Strung together like this, the book is like three novels in one. I could see the author having stretched those out into 1 or even 2 more books (after all, this is the longest of the three novels), but I'm thankful it all wrapped up here.
Whereas the first two novels spent a lot of time building up to their point, as in the concept of the Dark Forest in the second novel, this one essentially hurls concepts at you one after another as if you're in a batting cage. It makes for a fun but sometimes bewildering ride and may not be for everyone. Still, this has Cixin Liu's signature high-concept, big universe ideas in it and it is fun to work through them with his story-telling of this expanding universe as we come to know about more than just the Trisolarans.
A couple of the concepts reminded me of the Priscilla Hutchins series by Jack McDevitt, which I also greatly enjoyed for its whole "the Universe is a lot bigger than you think, kid" way of story-telling.