I came into Death’s End with a little bit of skepticism; I absolutely adored The Dark Forest, a book I still think about to this day. My misgivings, however, were thoroughly abated as Liu Cixin outdid himself. It was an edge-of-your-seat ride all the way until what I thought to be a fitting conclusion.
I made sure to not peek at the page numbers when I was reading this, and so there were countless points in (what I thought to be) the second half of the book where we would finally warm into a conclusion. But alas, there was always something else around the corner, and I marvel just at the grandeur of what Liu has covered. Time travel, light-speed travel, political theatre, multi-dimensions interactions, alien civilizations, doomsday scenarios, and about a million more things written in a highly believable and compelling way. Each of those themes would probably warrant a novel in themselves, but Liu is able to arrange all of them together in such a way that doesn’t make reading the book claustrophobic.
The book is heavily intertwined with The Dark Forest and Luo Ji. After having finished Death’s End, my appreciation and awe for what Liu did in The Dark Forest rose significantly. It is nothing short of astounding the level of internal consistency with respect to characters and events given how large the world is.
After exiting the universe of Death’s End, I found that my perspective of this world shifted a little bit. The world of the book is so grand and so expansive that I found the world of reality to be a little simple in comparison. It makes me yearn for the next Sci-Fi epic I come across, I have already taken the step of putting holds on all the potential e-books that have promise from my local library!
Verdict
Highly Recommended. Death’s End is good old fashioned Sci-Fi, it has everything I could have ever wanted out the genre. What put’s it over the top is the universe he Liu crafted, it is SO imaginative and expansive that I find it hard to believe that it came from a single person.