On Death's End

I started this last week, but I blitzed through ninety-one percent of it — some 550 pages, by my Kindle — in about a day and a half. Liu Cixin is, in short, completely insane, in the best possible way. Each scene makes the ones before it feel minuscule, and I’m left with a sense of awe and wonder on the grandest scales imaginable. As the Trisolarans put it at the end of The Three-Body Problem: “You are bugs.” (The series is far more empowering than that line suggests, but it’s hard to ignore now.)

Eleven hours later, I’m still thinking about the Singer — what a fascinating, whimsical character. His chapter does an enormous amount of work, and the whole last act of the book is carried by it.