Book review: Death's End by Cíxīn Liú
2026-08-23 BOOK-REVIEW
“Leave this puddle immediately. You are thin pictures. You’re fragile. If you stay in the puddle, you’ll turn into tombs in no time…”
— Cíxīn Liú, Death’s End
Death’s End is the grand conclusion to Cíxīn Liú’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. At over 700 pages in length, it’s the heftiest volume in the series, and the reason is clear the moment one opens the book. On the second page, the reader is greeted with “Table of Eras” outlining a timeline extending from the present day to several million years in the future, foreshadowing the vast ambition of the story.
As with its predecessor, Deaths’ End picks up shortly after the end of The Three Body Problem, the first book in this series, in the aftermath of the discovery that an alien race has sent an invasion army to Earth. This time we’re introduced to two new characters, Yun Tianmin and Cheng Xin, whose story runs in parallel with that of Luo Ji from the previous novel. Once again, the story progresses through several time leaps as the characters go through several cycles of cryogenic freezing. The bulk of the story follows Cheng Xin, though as before we move between other perspectives as well, fleshing out the wider human experience.
I’ll get it out of the way first: the writing still has the same issues as in the previous novels. The characters still feel as unrealistic as before, and the logic that underpins the story is as fragile. For example, the previous novel featured “wall-facers” and “wall-breakers”: individuals entrusted with important roles in plotting the course of history. This novel similarly features “sword-holders” who mediate the truce between the humans and aliens, and again, the same questions apply: why would we ever entrust such important jobs to individual humans? Another important section of the plot centres around the solving of riddles, and the logical leaps that the characters made to solve them reminded me of the criticisms of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And let’s not even get started on the bizarrely strict adherence that the future humans hold to inter-galactic property rights.
But at this point, anyone who’s made it this far into the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy probably won’t be too surprised or bothered by such. The strength of these stories is in the spectacle, and there’s still plenty of that here. After setting the scene in the first part of the book, the story moves to the future in the aftermath of The Dark Forest, and continues to imagine what society might look like as humankind extends itself throughout our solar system and beyond. The book readily explores tangents related to ambitious science and engineering projects, making for some truly awe-inspiring scenes that stretch the reader’s imagination. The encounters with alien technology are consistently chilling, and balance the optimism of human progress with new threats beyond our imagination.
In fact, the sheer number of ideas and sub-plots in the book eventually begins to feel a bit exhausting. Each time jump requires the reader to re-adjust to a whole new world that Cheng Xin finds herself in, and added to all these is anextended sequence where a character tells a fairy tale set in a fantasy world. The number of ideas included in the book feels unfocused at times, and towards the end it all starts to weigh down on the reader when new concepts keep getting introduced even in an epilogue that extends much longer beyond the climax of the story that I’d expected.
As for the climax itself: the story ends with a spectacular and emotional look across millennia of human progress, that reinforces the main themes of the story. It’s a suitably epic conclusion to the trilogy as a whole, and during those scenes I struggled to put the book down. The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy goes out with a bang, and left me with plenty of fodder for the imagination that I’m sure I’ll be turning over in my head for years to come.