Review: Death's End

Death's End is the final book in the Rememberance of Earth's Past series by Liu Cixin. It's also the first book to contain an apostrophe in the title, which forced me to learn how to escape quotes in my blog's description field. 🙄 Naturally, after unveiling two mind-blowing reviews of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest to international acclaim (idk, I think maybe two people read them) as if I wasn't going to write a third. 💅

If you've read my other reviews, at this point you'll know the drill. We all know this book is great. I'm going to gripe about the things that I don't think make sense, or I personally didn't like.

Cheng Xin Sucks

Cheng Xin is fine initially. She's a smart girl in the right place at the right time. She has an out-of-the-box idea that spawns the staircase project, which thrusts her team into the international spotlight as she launches her friend's brain into space. She also obtains essentially immeasurable wealth by being gifted a star due to complete dumb luck. Up to this point, she's a good character. Let me simplify some of the choices she makes in order to make my point:

Choice 1

Cheng Xin is promoted to swordholder, where her only job is to press a button if Trisolarans attack. Trisolarans attack. She doesn't press the button. By knowingly doing nothing, she sets humanity on the path to extinction and directly causes the deaths of billions of people over the next few years. She's later saved by dumb luck, as the crew of Blue Space take over Gravity in a completely unrelated sequence of events and save earth. Trisolarans admit she's a terrible swordholder and they should have picked her old boss Wade.

Choice 2

Somehow Cheng Xin isn't lynched by the public for previous mistake despite the earth government having done worse to people for less in previous books, and returns to her cushy post as CEO of her cool space company. She doesn't actually do anything of course, that's all her assistant AA, who created and runs the company for her. Wade returns to her and essentially says: "See, you stink at this leadership thing. You know how we decoded that humanity needs to study light-speed travel? Well, how about I actually run your company for you for a while, and I do that?". Cheng Xin is like: "Ok, but only if I can take it back if I don't like what you've done" and goes to bed for 60 years. Upon waking, she witnesses the new civilisation Wade has created, all the work he's done, and the dawn of this next age of humanity. Wade wants to do more, and Cheng Xin says: "I don't like this little army you've made, despite having done nothing with it." and literally gets him executed.

Result

Several decades later, when the solar system is two-dimensionalized to death, in brilliant irony, Cheng Xin and AA are the only humans to escape the solar system in the only lightspeed ship in existence off the back of Wade's research that she halted. Here is a quote from the book after this:

She began to hate someone: Wade. She hated that he kept his promise.

The gall of this woman to hate Wade after she killed him, AND his technology saved her.

The story following Cheng Xin makes sense because she's the only human in the universe whose life spans the timeline of the novel. On the other hand, I'd much rather read a book about how Wade actively navigates intergalactic politics, graduating humans to a lightspeed travelling, dimensional weapon controlling species. Watching Cheng Xin flow through the river of time making mistake after mistake is just infuriating.

Dimensionality Collapse Questions?

Besides Cheng Xin being cringe af, the pockets of 4D and dimensionality attacks (although totally epic, I'm not disputing that) raised a few questions from me:

How did Cheng Xin escape the 2-d-ification of the solar system?

As the 2D plane was expanding and destroying the universe, it was explained that the expansion was speeding up, and assumedly asympoting to the speed of light because it was explained that nobody could escape unless they had a lightspeed ship. So surely Cheng Xin, travelling at the speed of light, would only be able to delay the inevitable indefinitely? But it turns out this was perfectly explained by this line 🙄:

Would the collapse never stop? It was best not to think about it too much.

Which gives me Austin Powers time travel vibes:

If aliens can protect against the collapse when delivering the plane, then humans should be able to as well?

When the "dual-vector foil" (an excellent name for a 2D-plane btw) was delivered into the solar system, it was shrouded by some white protective coating until detonation. This implies that it's possible to contain a dimensional collapse. It's a shame that humanity never had enough time to research or attempt to create something that could contain this attack, but it makes sense that they didn't. The aliens who attacked with it are mentioned to have been at war, and implied to have already transformed themselves into 2D beings to survive the attack. Surely, if they possess the ability to contain a 2D weapon to attack, they could also contain a 2D weapon used to attack them?

How could the sophons exist in higher dimensional space without collapsing?

In this book, higher dimensional space seems to degenerate into lower dimensional space when touched by it. We see pockets of 4D collapse into 3D, and the solar system collapse into 2D. Surely this implies that the Trisolarans possess the ability to prevent this dimensional collapse, since they've had 12D sophons zipping around earth forever without collapsing?

Secret Information Fairytales are Epic

The one praise I will sing is that I thought the fairytale about He'ershingenmosiken was awesome as a standalone story, let alone the delivery device of information to save Earth! Very cool stuff.