Death’s End Concludes a Hard Sci-Fi Magnus Opus of Unparalleled Scope

Midway through this novel, we join a distant alien being as it observes the conflict between Earth and the Trisolarans, a head-to-head centuries (and three door-stopping books) in the making. This being is billions of miles away, on the other side of the galaxy, so far that all that can be catalogued are a few large-scale communications. In this quick, disorienting view of the entirety of the series to date, Liu almost casually drives home concepts he has been wrestling with for hundreds of pages. Think of the famous tracking shot that opens the film Contact (another story of humanity catching the attention of far more advanced beings): the view opens on the edge of the Earth, and pulls back and back, slowly through the solar neighborhood, the galactic neighborhood, then faster and faster, out, out into the stars. Death’s End is written on a huge canvass, and it absolutely dwarfs everything that came before it. Wow.
The series was already something of a juggernaut. Hugely popular in Liu’s native China, The Three-Body Problem successfully made the jump across the ocean and the cultural divide, due in part, I’m sure, to Ken Liu’s adroit translation. It became the first foreign language novel to be nominated for the Nebula since Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the first to win the Hugo, full stop. The Dark Forest didn’t pick up the same kind of acclaim—how soon we become habituated—I think mostly due to its inherent position as the middle novel in a trilogy—though it is hardly the exercise in pointless wheel-spinning that can occur in a book two. It’s more that, by needs, its true implications are pushed to this concluding installment. The trilogy follows the classic storytelling model: introduction, rising action, and then climax. And what a climax.

The scale of the series has long been expanding, the field of view growing ever larger. The Three-Body Problem starts intimately, detailing the life of scientist Ye Wenjie. We see first her horror and grief as her scientist father is killed by students in the Cultural Revolution. Her disgust with humanity colors her (and Earth’s) first contact with the Trisolarans, setting the two planets on a collision course (not quite literally, but close enough.) From there, the global view of unfolding contact and conflict with an alien species is mediated through Wang Miao, a scientist who is unknowingly being manipulated through Trisolaran sophons (a sort of quantum computer and ansible), along with the whole world’s scientific community. The first book ends with the knowledge that an invasion fleet is coming, and Earth has 400 years to prepare. People are divided in their responses: collusion with the Trisolarans, fatalist denial, fervent resistance, and everything in between.
The Dark Forest mostly follows the irascible Luo Ji and his fellow Wallfacers, a select number of geniuses chosen to secretly thwart the Trisolaran threat. Because the sophons are always watching, no plan can be communicated from one person to another, lest it be ascertained by either the aliens or the people in collusion with them. You can see how being a Wallfacer, tasked with this marvelously difficult project, might make one cranky. We see the failure of several of them (and of their antagonists, the Wallbreakers) while Luo Ji takes the freedom and resources afforded the group to more or less goof off for a decade or so. Humanity develop cryosleep, and the plot keeps skipping forward, closer and closer to the Trisolaran threat. I won’t spoil the solution that keeps the Trisolarans at bay (and which gives the book its name), but I will note it is intimately connected with the Fermi Paradox—the apparent contradiction between the likelihood of alien life, and the complete lack of evidence for the existence of alien intelligence.

Having posited a solution to the reason we have never encountered alien intelligence, Liu twists the answer into a hundred thousand more problems in Death’s End. Though we’re back to more or less a single protagonist—both prior books have large, ever-expanding casts—Death’s End covers eons and acres, all across the universe and beyond time, recalling the long game and careful ecology of Frank Herbert’s Dune saga, which starts with one man and ends millennia later, after investigating all manner of thought experiments. (Also, like Herbert, Liu can have a tin ear for dialogue and minimal shading in his secondary characters, and occasionally not in his protagonists.) Cheng Xin takes charge of Earth’s planetary defense after she awakens from her cryosleep, and dips in and out of history as humanity interacts with its galactic neighbors. Which is an altogether dry and boring way to put it, but I can’t do it justice in this small a space.

The series’ Chinese title, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, deliberately invokes Proust’s multi-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past. There are a lot of ways this is not an apt analogy, she said, pointing out the obvious: Proust’s rounds of dinner parties, social maneuvering, and bitchiness are simply not a part of most science fiction, let alone the big ideas of hard science fiction. (That said, I find it fascinating how often I run into Proust in the stars—Kim Stanley Robinson weaves references to Proust all through 2312, down to the name of the protagonist.) Yet there is something Proustian in Liu’s intense focus on his subject—the way he builds whole worlds for you to explore, and then, shifting the vantage point, rediscover anew. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,” sayeth Proust, and hopefully he’ll forgive me for turning him into an aphorist. Neither he nor Cixin Liu have works that can be easily summed.
The complete Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy is available now.