Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor)

When a man buys the woman he loves a star,  Earth’s fate is sealed. Centuries before, a Trisolaran identified humanity’s primary weapon as love. Now it becomes the instrument of the planet’s destruction.

This is not a plot spoiler, since this book concludes a trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Nor is the conquest and subsequent destruction of Earth the most startling facet, or the culmination, of Death’s End. The trilogy has persistently pointed out that the betrayal of humanity will come from humans themselves and every character has shown to some degree that this is true. In this conclusion, the end of our world is set into motion by Cheng Xin, a woman so steeped in compassion and ethics that she’s unable to become an aggressor, not even when that’s called for.

Within the first half of this book, the Earth has been conquered, humans have become slave labor in migrant camps, and the entire solar system becomes endangered. At this point, we are all at the mercy of Cixin Liu’s diabolical imagination, cast out into space, exploring the threats of altered dimensions while swooping through millennia at dizzying speed.

It’s been obvious from the first book in this trilogy that Cixin Liu has a vast body of scientific knowledge that many of us lack. Footnotes provided by the translator can take readers only so far. When scientific theories and truths become intertwined with the settings envisioned by Liu, ordinary minds boggle. His plots range so wide that to summarize them is impossible. It’s hard enough to keep up with them when reading. There’s only one thing to do: buckle up, take a deep breath, hold on tight, and enjoy the journey.

There’s much to enjoy. Cities with buildings that hang like leaves from gigantic trees, an elevator that whisks humans through the Milky Way, the glory of a sunrise seen from space, an entire universe captured in an orb that creates a perfect Eden of only a few miles. 

Although Liu’s universe is alluring, its vast loneliness enforces its own rules. “Let me tell you,” the commanding officer of a rogue spaceship says, “when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”

When humans are lost in Liu’s imagination, it takes only five minutes to reach fascination and fear. Questions of indvidual responsibility emerge into an uncomfortable precedence and fantasies feel unsettlingly close to predictions. Suddenly our forays into space seem as though they’re a foolhardy and naive act of hubris. What sleeping civilization might this provoke?

Does that sound absurd? On this planet where some people drown while fleeing in unseaworthy boats while others look for new sanctuaries in their private spacecrafts, it seems a quick step to reach the scenarios created by Cixin Liu. By combining his expertly observed insights of human nature with the terrors that can be found within a two-dimensional universe or in the body of a beautiful robot powered by artificial intelligence, he takes the realities of today and extrapolates them into the plausible horrors of the future.~Janet Brown