Review: Death's End

Death's End by Liu Cixin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a novel (with characters arcs and such, although I'm really speaking of the series as whole), this is mostly just okay or perhaps even mediocre to some extent. But as an exploration into the potential for space exploration and astrophysics research and all of its implications on a macro-scale, this book/series is amazing.

Most of the characters here mainly exist to help demonstrate difficult scientific concepts at the end of the day. You get a sense of the impact of all of these mind-blowing developments on how insignificant it makes them (and by proxy, us) feel in the bigger scheme of things... and I mean that to a much greater extent than what The Dark Forest left us with, cause I thought the ending of that was mind-blowing enough already.

The second half of this book is just next-level. I haven't read much sci-fi that broaches this scale, but the closest media I've consumed that gets to this is probably End of Evangelion (anime), Xenogears (JRPG), or Narutaru (manga), but those tended toward the more post-apocalyptic-universe side of things just for dramatic story-telling effect. The main difference with this series being, the story here backs its concepts up with enough actual science to make it almost believable that something like this could actually happen to us in the future. And that's just terrifying.

I'll admit it can feel a tad jarring sometimes to see lots of otherwise seemingly average characters suddenly spewing out complicated physics metaphors and PhD level analyses as almost knee-jerk reactions to the crazy things happening around them (like seriously, given recent events I expect your average human/government to be stupider than this), but for the greater good of pushing the limits of this genre, I'm willing to give this all a pass.

To be honest, it's probably debatable which book is better between this and Dark Forest, but overall, I heartily recommend this series as a whole to anyone looking to broaden their understanding of how science can impact us (and I'm going to avoid the obvious pun here lol). Too many book series out there start out with strong first entries only to end on a whimper, but this, this one goes out with a big bang. (literally) (I'm so sorry)