Death’s End

The closing volume of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which takes the standoff established in The Dark Forest and keeps widening the frame until the timescale is cosmological and the physics itself is a weapon — civilisations lower the dimensionality of space, or the speed of light, as acts of war. Liu’s habit of following one idea to its most extreme consequence, rather than stopping where a story would normally stop, is the whole appeal.

Context: On the a16z Infra Reading List under the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series, the third of the three volumes listed. It is the one that reads least like a novel and most like a sequence of thought experiments about what technology does at scale.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Liu Cixin — the author.
• The Three-Body Problem — volume one.
• The Dark Forest — volume two, whose deterrence logic this book resolves.
• China — the trilogy’s origin, and the market the list flags.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.