
When Everything Goes Dark: Death’s End, a Review and Reflection
“The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”
Death’s End is the conclusion to the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by the Chinese science fiction writer, Cixin Liu (@liu_cixin). The first book, The Three-Body Problem, won the Hugo award in 2015 and the final book, Death’s End, was up for the same award this year. I feel I have little to convey in the realm of a “review” other than my singular experience of reading the books.
The story of Remembrance of Earth’s Past stems from a first contact event between a Chinese physicist and an alien race who does not have the best of intentions toward the inhabitants of planet Earth. The story arc over the three volumes stretches from the relatively recent past to an unimaginable future, unfolding as the most complex and nuanced allegory of the human condition I’ve ever read. Nearly every question humanity has wrestled with is pulled out, woven into the journey and confronted by a singular protagonist as the focus for each book.
Death’s End follows Cheng Xin, a rocket scientist from our time, the “Common Era”, awakened from hibernation 500 years in the future. The time she enters is prosperous and peaceful, but in delicate balance with the alien forces looking to destroy it. Cheng Xin is given the task of maintaining Earth’s defense against the omnipresent enemy. From there we take off.
If the complexity and expanse of the first two books drew you in and occasionally tossed your mental abilities around on the proverbial mat, Death’s End will eclipse them both quickly and pull you through a telescope of time hops and astrophysics. Levity is found only in a few places, like a sequence of fairy tales told as a way to convey the state of the universe. These stories are part of a departure from the writing in the previous two books, the primary narrative is broken up—Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style—with a journal called A Past Outside of Time, to offer the reader perspective and backstory. The writing style was a bit jarring, almost like I missed something, but by the time I got to the second half of the book the interludes become clearer part of the whole.
Finishing Death’s End leaves you emotionally and mentally exhausted. The questions raised and resolutions offered in the book, in context of the 2017 solar eclipse madness that emerged in the United States only added to my experience. I can not even begin to imagine the task undertaken by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen (@jdmartinsen) to find the English words to represent the detail and depth of both the science and the emotion throughout these books.
In the preface of Ken Liu’s own collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, he writes on being a translator,
“We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.”
I would have no experience of Cixin Liu’s books if it were not for Ken Liu’s words. After finishing Death’s End time looped back on itself, I was reminded of a poem I wrote in 2008, echoing my own versions of questions raised throughout Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Our minds managed to touch briefly.
