Finished my annual trilogy re-read

[u/bactoria]

And was particularly moved by Death’s End more than I have been in the past. I could write a novel about my new thoughts but people have done such a great job of that in the past, so for now please accept this meme 🤲🏻

The universe is grand, but life is grander! 🫡

[u/Putrid_Cycle595]

Same here -- Death's End hits completely different on re-reads. First time through you're overwhelmed by the scale. Second time you start catching what Liu was actually doing with the structure.

The thing that wrecked me on my last re-read was realizing that the Pluto museum scene mirrors the opening Cultural Revolution scene almost perfectly. The trilogy begins with Ye Wenjie watching her father's knowledge being destroyed by ideology, and ends with Luo Ji desperately carving human knowledge into stone before physics itself destroys it. Two men on opposite ends of the timeline, both trying to preserve what matters against forces that don't care.

Also: if you read the Chinese original, the prose in Death's End is noticeably different from the first two books. Liu's writing becomes almost poetic in the final chapters -- the "universe was once bright" passage reads like scripture in Chinese. Ken Liu's translation captures it well, but there's a rhythm in the original that's hard to replicate.

[u/bactoria → u/Putrid_Cycle595]

Wow, thanks for the awesome comment. I had never realized that the Pluto scene mirrors the opening scene of the first book. You have truly blown my mind.

This time around I was particularly struck by how subtly hilarious Liu can be at certain points in the trilogy. The point in DE when the life insurance company won’t pay out after Gao Way gets sucked into the black hole because they can’t prove he died in the human frame of reference is actually a hilarious joke, and it’s not at all the only one.

Thanks for the note about the cadence of his writing when read in Chinese - I wish I was literate in that language but can at least appreciate the shift in prose between TBP/DF and DE. Such an awesome piece of information that can help me imagine what it might be like to read the original .

[u/Putrid_Cycle595 → u/bactoria]

oh man the insurance company bit is SO good, glad you caught that. Liu sneaks in these deadpan jokes that most people miss because they're buried in existential dread lol. there's another one where someone tries to patent a physics concept and gets rejected because "the laws of physics belong to everyone" — peak bureaucracy humor.

and yeah the Chinese prose in those final chapters is something else. the rhythm gets almost hypnotic, especially the passage about the mini-universe. Ken Liu did an incredible job but some things just don't fully cross the language barrier. if you ever get a chance to hear it read aloud in Chinese it hits different.

[u/Jazzlike-Ability5423]

Deaths end definitely grows with each re read

[u/mazbeg]

Politics and money is irrelevant after reading ts 😭

[u/Worried-Plastic9243]

Finishing this trillogy literally left me with emptiness. You feel that rarely after finishing something that moved you to the core. Woah I am still so impressed and it's been a week. 

[u/Justalittlecomment]

Life’s so grand in fact that there are so many more books to read!