Death's End
| Author | Liu Cixin |
| Vote | 8/10 |
| Reviewed on | 2020-06-23 |
| Read in | English |
This volume concludes the incredible trilogy written by the Chinese author Liu Cixin1 and the one containing one of the elements that I found profoundly fascinating when reading an article on The Guardian (that I haven’t managed to fish out of the Net) that initially convinced me to start reading it. I’m talking about the promise that the story would cover an absurd number of years (I think that the last one is the year 18 million and something). Evidently there’s no coverage of each year :/
The book starts way before where the second volume ended: in the year 1500, when Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire is about to fall in the hands of the Turks2. The episode is used to introduce a concept which will be explained better further along the book, and its effect is the disappearance of portions of the physical reality. Believe me, like the rest of the story, this one makes sense when you run into it later on.
The story is incredible, as in the other volumes of the trilogy. This one is even better than The Dark Forest, but introduces way more concepts that leave the reader stupefied and makes them devour the pages. Some of the description that probably had the intent of appearing more descriptive or bookish still didn’t impress me at all and could have been avoided, but they don’t hurt the overall structure and don’t make me recommend any less. Grab this stuff and read it, you won’t be sorry you did.
1: I’ve learned that names in Chinese are given as Last, First so that Liu is the author’s family name (as clarified on Wikipedia). Apparently, you pronounce it something like Lee-oo Tsisheen.
2: Never take the numbers I write literally. I’m too lazy to check their correctness, even on the Web. Accuracy, in this case, doesn’t matter much.