Death's End

I don't even know what to say... this is epic.

I am lost for words after finishing the final entry of this trilogy - it took every expectation I had of it, destroyed it to smithereens, and came up with something unprecedented.
With this concluding work, Cixin Liu has cemented his place among the greats - this is the best hard sci-fi work written since Asimov's ‘The Last Question'. The works of sci-fi landing in ‘unprecedented scope' was generally mutually exclusive with ‘actually mind-blowing for once', but Cixin Liu has demolished those barriers effortlessly.
It moves so much beyond its initial foundations of first contact that it is barely recognisable - but it is all the more better for it, as it is not chained to a particular niche. Exploring concepts as varied as dimensional flattening and time warping, and making sure that the plot stays on track, is an underappreciated talent that potential sci-fi writers would do good to take note of.
This series is the closest I've seen a sci-fi series come to the platonic ideal of ‘sci-fi' - the literature of ideas. The trilogy is a must read for anyone who has ever read sci-fi and would like a more serious take on it.

Confusing time jumps

There are some nice features—grand, fascinating, new sci-fi ideas like dark forest deterrence game theory and other dimensions, interactions with 4th dimension, dark forest proof, sophon in human society, shocking action episode with heavy consequences, some creepy anomalies. But these features happen so rarely over the course of the 700 pages book and are made insignificant by everything else in the book. Like Singer is so interesting, unusual and excellently shows a perspective of a super powerful civilization. Why is there only one small chapter about him?

It reads like a documentary in some chapters describing a character's biography and history and jumps around time periods that were already explored in the previous books. Overall there are a lot of time jumps here with too many explanations. And the very long and vague fairytales holding some very important secrets that require too much time to decipher, yeah, that’s what we need in a sci-fi story about dark forests and aliens. And author being too sexist in places—introvert scientist who "had never even touched woman", very feminine men who look strange to the main character who is a woman—like it’s from 1970s, not 2010.

Also after a few disasters with the same kind of solution in a row it becomes really hard to care, especially when the main character who is much less interesting than those in the previous books and with the dialogues being terrible in places. The last part of the book, about 100 pages, being really dark doesn’t help at all.

I hope this story can be presented in a more exciting way in the 2nd and 3rd seasons of the series as this world has a lot of potential.