Death’s End

Author: Cixin Liu
Translator: Ken Liu
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates 2016

A few years ago, I attended a talk given by a scientist at the Royal Asiatic Society Auditorium at Green Path with a close friend of mine. At the end of the talk, my friend got up and asked:

"Why isn’t anyone doing research about going faster than the speed of light? Why do we still take for granted assumptions of a hundred-year-old theory? Shouldn't we question those theories we have learned in colleges and universities?"

He meant the speed of light in a vacuum.  

Footnote 1: In 1998, Lene Vestergaard Hau and a team of scientists from Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science slowed a beam of light to about 17 meters per second in a medium.

Footnote 2: Later, this same friend told me that he learned in school that Buddha was born in India, and he accepted it without questioning. Now, he believes that Buddha was born in Sri Lanka, and I stopped reasoning with him after a while.

This is the third and final part of the "Three-body Problem" science fiction series. Liu should have concluded the story at the end of the second book. This extension is unnecessary and contains absurd claims, akin to those propounded by my friend.

I enjoyed the book up to about halfway through, specifically until the end of deciphering the riddle of three fairy tales. After that, it quickly went downhill. The narrative delved into discussions about advanced civilizations—far more advanced than human civilization—living in two-dimensional space, civilizations capable of altering the speed of light in a vacuum, civilizations capable of changing the laws of physics, civilizations able to create their own universes, and much more nonsensical content.

If this were my own copy of the book, I would have stopped reading halfway through. The rationale behind this decision is that if someone later claimed the ending was good, I could always return to it and give it another try. However, since this is a library copy, I endured it all the way to the end.

I had awarded four and a half stars to the first two books. However, I cannot give more than two stars to this book.