Review: Death's End by Liu Cixin

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy contains, arguably, some of the biggest, most original, most outrageous, and most mind-blowing ideas ever seen in a Sci-Fi series. Of the three books, Death’s End is the craziest of all, packed to the brim with astonishing ideas and an absolutely epic scope. Unfortunately, it’s not very well written—the characters are flat and don’t act particularly human and there is way too much high level exposition (too much tell, not enough show)—but it’s still well worth reading to see Liu Cixin’s creativity and ability to nerd out with physics and philosophy.

Some of my favorite ideas, thoughts, and technologies from the book (WARNING, spoilers!):

• Technology that allows humans to hibernate would be the ultimate measure of inequality. The rich would be able to skip to the paradise of the future while the poor would be left behind to build that very future.

• The universe is expanding at the speed of light in every direction. Since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, a piece of information from one end of the universe will never be able to reach the other end.

• Building technologies that can change the laws of physics. For example, slowing down light speed to create a black hole barrier known as a dark domain, where anything within the domain can never escape and anything outside of the domain can never enter. This is the ultimate signal to the universe that you are totally harmless and should be left alone. Another example is a way to collapse the universe to a lower dimension: e.g., a weapon that collapses 3-dimensional space to two dimensions.

• The idea that the entire universe has been at war and bears the scars of these law-of-physics weapons. Perhaps we used to live in 10-dimensional space, but the repeated use of dimensional weapons has reduced that to three. People born in a three-dimensional universe, of course, assume that’s normal and it’s always been that way. But how would we know if the laws of physics used to be different?

• Hiding secrets in a children’s story by double-encoding it.

• The need for human beings to make decisions that affect entire solar systems, galaxies, or universes. Can a single human decide the fate of not only all other humans, but countless other species, both past and future?

• Cylinder worlds orbiting Jupiter, using the spin of the cylinder to create artificial gravity for the cities living on the inner edge of the cylinder. Older cities surrounding Jupiter that have no gravity where humans float from place to place by pushing off of buildings, similar to how gibbons might swing from trees in a forrest.

• The thought experiment of how to preserve human information for a very long period of time, such as 100 million or a billion years. All our modern technologies—e.g., hard drives, CDs, paper—would stop functioning long before that. Only words carved in stone could ever last that long.

Rating: 5 stars