Review: Death's End

Death's End by Liu Cixin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Oh, how the mighty have fallen, as least as far as I'm concerned.

The first book in this series, The Three-Body Problem, was released to considerable acclaim a few years ago, winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I didn't care much for it or the sequel, The Dark Forest, only giving them (barely) two stars each. Looking at those reviews now, I realize I was trying to be nice, for some incomprehensible reason. Well, that's enough of that. I have no problem saying that this book is a clunky, bloated, godawful mess.

I do wonder if this might be due to the different culture and language. (This is not knocking the translator, by the way--Ken Liu, the translator for the first in the series and this book, has done a masterful job.) Liu Cixin is the equivalent of a rock star in China, far more famous than hard SF authors tend to be in the US. The most affecting part of any of the books is the first section of The Three-Body Problem, dealing with the Cultural Revolution. I believe the author is a great fan of Arthur C. Clarke, and some of the other Chinese SF I've read seems to be quaintly retro, written for an audience fifty years past. All this adds up to a great whopping doorstop of a book that not only sends the human race four hundred but billions of years into the future...and unfortunately, felt like it took every minute of the universe's seventeen-billion-year lifespan to read.

Look, if you like your hard SF laden with physics to the point where it feels like a textbook--or maybe a dreadful, dull, droning lecture--instead of an actual novel; if you like books with characters that have no more life and personality than the flattened, two-dimensional state our solar system is reduced to (lovingly described in every excruciating detail over the course of 26 pages); if you like clunky prose that only comes to "life," such as it is, when the author is delving into yet another way-out-there theoretical scientific concept; if you like stories with such grimdark bleakness that there is no way out for the human race other than to sit in a mini-universe, outside the passage of time, until the main universe contracts and is reborn; then go for it with this book. I do not. This is by far the worst book of the series, and I am glad it has come to its end.

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