Death's End

This completes the Three-Body Problem Trilogy, and takes us centuries into the future.

My impressions are on the entire series.

It's been termed “hard sci-fi” for a reason - there is a lot of science, arguments about science, and projections on scientific development within the huge span of this book.

The premise: An alien civilisation is looking for a new habitat and Earth is it. Humans have 450 years to prepare for the invasion and in that time, the aliens - Trisolarans - have sent invisible “sophons” to halt progress in fundamental physics and to also spy on human activities. Of course, this supposes that we (humans) are not alone in the universe. Indeed, not only are we not alone, but also in danger of being discovered by other alien civilisations, not just the Trisolarans.

The span of the story is breathtaking - four hundred and fifty years. Also, the challenge inherent in postulating how human civilisation will respond to such a threat to their existence. Will the world governments put aside differences and work together or will human society fracture into different groups seeking different solutions to the problem?

The author tackles all this, and more, and that in itself makes the book worth reading. I also enjoyed the arguments surrounding technology and should humans pursue a technological development that can guarantee its safety in the future but that can also annihilate it if it falls into the wrong hands at present?

Then there are the debates on whether human civilisation is worth saving at all, given the damage we have wrought on Earth, and would it be fair if a small segment of society, ie the ones who can afford to build the sophisticated ships with ecological systems on board, survives but the majority dies?

These, plus the premise, was what kept me ploughing through the pages, because, to be frank, the characters and the writing would not have sustained my interest.

There are so many characters in each volume of the trilogy that I rather gave up keeping track of them all except for the few who remained central to the tale. The characters felt a bit flat for me, especially the “Western” characters who populated Books 2 and 3 — some of them seemed like caricatures, and there were only a handful who came to life in a more meaningful way, most of them in Books and 3. Book 2 also came across as sexist in its depiction of women, with the main character, Luo Ji, going on and on about his version of the ideal woman - suffice to say, she would fit right in with all the traditional Asian stereotypes about the feminine ideal. This is repeated, though less obviously, in other parts of the trilogy, so much so that I felt it was the author's view and not his characters.

Fortunately, the story kept me reading. The tech is fascinating and among those I found most interesting included hibernation, the information windows, lightspeed spacecraft, anti-matter weapons, slowing down the speed of light, and the unfolding or falling in of dimensions.

The story does not have a happy ending. Earth dies. In fact, the entire Solar System is annihilated. The nature of the attack is itself intriguing and involves the Solar System being sucked into a two-dimensional plane, thereby losing light, life, and energy. The humans that survive are those who escaped the Solar System and find other habitable planets.

This book does not make for light nor entertaining reading. It does raise important questions about our existence in this universe, the rate of technological progress, the futures we are building and the legacies we want to leave behind.