Death’s End

I became so entranced with this book that it got to the point where yesterday afternoon, evening and night became an 8+ hour blur in which I could barely get up from my chair, reading through the final 300 pages of this book in one sitting. This series is that enthralling, it is that good.

I heard from a friend who has also finished the series (this is the 3rd book  in the Three Body Problem trilogy) that Deaths End, was underwhelming compared to the first and second. I disagree, although I concede the genius of the Dark Forest nature of the universe that the second book ushered in was perhaps the coolest part of the series.

All 3 books manipulate long stretches of time as the theatre of its storytelling, but Death’s End uses it far more than Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest. Death’s end also comes up with (as it needs to in order to fit this timeline) many more advanced projections about the universal laws of physics, which to me was endlessly fascinating to read. I could imagine why a world class physicist or cosmologist might disagree with Cixin Liu’s interpretations and therefore may be slightly annoyed with the book, but to someone like me, far under that level of knowledge, I am cloaked enough by my own ignorance to have fully enjoyed this without an asterisk.

I just finished this book a few hours ago, but it is already clear that reading this series permanently changes you (even just a tiny bit). It forces you to think about the context of your life and decisions from the original position, and across timescales, dimensions, and physical space that you most likely have never seriously put your attention to.

That is its real genius — we have all thought fleetingly about these topics, but our regular, mundane life usually intercedes and distracts us after only a few moments. Here, you are forced to confront all of it over the course of dozens of hours and a few thousand pages. Doing so really changes your frame of reference, and it exposes you to deeply fascinating (and at times terrifying) ideas.

Finishing this series now is giving me a renewed craving to dive back into reading human history from ancient times to the present, and have a fuller picture of our species from the beginning of recorded time. I think it is because the massive, multi-million year time scale hosted in the trilogy oddly gives you a renewed joy of living in our own minuscule slice of space-time, and a need to better understand it. It also gets me excited to dive a bit deeper into futurism (I’m looking forward to reading some Michio Kaku soon) to hear what some of the best minds have to say about timescales this big. I’m very excited for my friends to discover this series and have a similar experience to what I had reading it.