Thursday, January 19, 2017

Death's End Review and the whole Trilogy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25451264-death-s-end

If you don't know the series yet, do yourself a favour and read from the Three Body Problem, to The Dark Forest, followed by Death's End by Liu Ci Xin. Originally written in Chinese, it had been translated to English. I am glad to have brought the first two books. After reading so many science fiction novels and series, this one just became my best series so far. Better than Dune series, Foundation series, Robots series (by Issac Asimov), the Ender and Shadow series by Orson Scott Card.

It contains so many of the main characteristics of why we read science fiction: to have problems which we solve by science and technology. The problems presented in the books were so logically primed, it was amazing to see how the author did not back down from the challenge and is willing to let the characters in his book to pay the price for choosing something which is less than ideal or without foresight.

Although much of this book looks down upon love and compassion, the main character embodies it very well. It didn't gave the moral of the story as you should be as dark as the universe, but rather to always choose human nature over the beast nature, and be willing to bear the consequences if it didn't turned out well.

Spoilers ahead.

I am just sad at one thing, Cheng Xin never got to meet Yu Tianming again. Just a few minutes apart, they were suddenly separated by a few million years. It was the cruel application of basic physics and what happens when you manipulate the laws of nature. I thought somehow a clever Yu Tianming and AA would meet up with Cheng Xin and Guan Yilun again. Too bad no such thing happened. Haiz....

To be sure, it was hard to read the process whereby the Solar System gets turned into 2D.

The most amazing part was actually the fairy tale. I would have loved to stop and kept on thinking about what it meant if I wasn't so eager to let the book do the job for me. It's so brilliant that the message was well hidden. So sad the humanity didn't pay more effort into thinking more about it and linking it to manipulation of the laws of physics before going full speed on the bunker project.

It seems that the Trisolarians were afraid that humanity would be able to use these advance tech to destroy both Trisolarian fleet before they were safely out of range of the solar system, so they didn't share these tech. At least they allowed humans to keep on having a little bit more time and some chance to escape.