Deaths End by Cixin Liu

Death's End by Cixin Liu is the third and final book of the Rememberence of Earth's Past trilogy.

The series includes The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and of course, Death's End. I completed the first two books earlier this year and now I've finished the last one.

This one took me significantly longer then the previous two. It was a lot larger then the previous ones, probably more than double the first book, and I also ended up taking two breaks while reading it. I hit a wall a few times and needed to take a break to read two other books that I was interested in. I do that sometimes if I'm not fully into a story or if I lose momentum or I'm just finding it difficult to proceed with. In this case I luckily returned to the book though, which doesn't always happen. Sometimes I never go back to a book and it gets left unfinished indefinitely.

My main issue with this one was that for the majority of it I felt like I was reading a text book rather than a story. Whereas the first book was a character driven fictional narrative, this one was maybe 50% story and 50% historical fact driven text. It kind of felt like fictionalized nonfiction. I found those parts to be very dry and difficult for me to get into. They often took me out of the story and lead to my frequent breaks in reading.

This was one of those books where I really wanted to know what happens and was super interested in the outcome and the ending, but one that I really didn't enjoy the process of reading and was really just wanting it to finish the entire time. I'm finding that more and more with any sci-fi or fantasy epic or series. I'm having difficulty remaining interested in long drawn out fiction. My taste these days is moving back to non-fiction which I used to read exclusively and to single book fiction, preferably short and to the point stories without any filler added.

Positives about this book were that I didn't have any issue with the translation this time, which was an issue for me with the previous books in the series. Also the concepts and ideas were always interesting, very creative and super imaginative. Some of the ideas that the author discusses are way out there and very thought provoking. On the other hand, many of those ideas were so out there that they often went over my head. I'm not talking about concepts like black holes and relativity which are almost standard information at this point. I'm talking about multiple dimensions collapsing in on themselves, new universes being created within the existing one and strange "death lines" created by the speed of light being reduced to zero...

Needless to say, there were more than a few times where I couldn't really understand what the author was getting at. My wife told me, "Don't try to understand it, just read it for the vibes." It was sound advice I think.

This was the most difficult of the three books in the trilogy in my opinion, and the least story like. For that reason, I wasn't into it as much as the first book. Though the process was difficult and really unejyable at times for me, I did really like the trilogy as a whole and I'm glad that I read it. More importantly I'm glad that its finished.

What do you think? Would you read this book? Have you read the series or started to watch the Netflix series? Let me know in the comments.