Death's End - The naïveté of humankind, review

The conclusion of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy comes to an end. The story has come far since those first chapters of The Three-Body Problem so focused on Chinese history that one had to read translators comments to understand the intention of the words. Now, after many years after the crisis began, humanity lives in a completely different world, confronting threats that were unimaginable before.

I really like how we see the conclusion of some of the recurrent characters, some who I ended up despising and others that I felt close to. But the character that makes more progress is humanity itself. The challenges that face humanity in this story are eye opening. The author not only presents a sci-fi story to spark a wild imagination, but it also solidifies philosophical questions and shows the possible consequences of our naïve space exploration.

For years, we have been wondering if we are alone in the universe, if there is life beyond the heat of our sun. And assuming we are not as special as we usually pretend, why we haven’t found it yet. Remembrance of Earth’s Past puts us in a fictional result of those thoughts. It tells us what could happen if we keep asking those questions instead of asking if we should even look for other civilizations. Maybe we should do everything we can to make ourselves invisible in the vastness of the dark forest.

Seeing the consequences of the Dark Forest theory, introduced in the previous book, and put beyond what I could have imagined, is also great. The author keeps surprising me with additional levels of power and technology. I always wonder how much further can power go in a science-fiction scenario. I’m used to see fantasy grow the power to extremes, but how can you do that with hard science and technology? The technologies and fundamental theories explored by this series are mind blowing. From new forms of communication to technology to travel at light-speed, even higher dimensional physics, the series explores mind-blowing concepts that will make me read additional explanations and summaries to grasp fully.

As with everything I read, some details run wild in my imagination, morphing and growing to eventually settle in some part of the Pulubi. It’s what I love the most about reading, how it fuels the infinite machine of imagination to bring into existence new forms.

One concept that fascinated me the most is to see how the author raises the question of what makes us humans. During the events of the book, we find on multiple occasions when humanity itself considers how some fellow humans have lost their humanity, how they are something else entirely. I often find thoughts like this come from brutal acts that dehumanize the characters in question or from a scientific long evolution that departs the physical form from the original. But in this case, the author makes us question how seemingly small acts and just a bit of time can come to question if those committing them are still one of us. Seeing how being isolated in a spaceship in an unreachable part of the universe makes one question their relation to humanity. Or how stuffing the entire human race in a confine space and make it fight for survival to the extreme would make us consider if those taking part in such survival game are still human.

Overall, I really liked the book and the series. Very thought provoking, with plenty of ideas that will keep echoing in the back of my mind for a long time.

Now let’s see how the adaptations fare in comparison.