Should have been Gilroy Part 3 of 3 Death's End

In the early aughts, Chinese language magazine Science Fiction World had become more ambitious than providing a platform for short form sci-fi. To move further, they became book mongers. The magazine editorial staff started to double as editors for 3 book labels: Masterpiece, Pop-culture and Cornerstone.

The first 2 are for translated into Simplified Chinese works, Masterpiece composed of award-winners’ well-regarded works while Pop-culture usually is another name for licensed slops. Though why Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was under Masterpiece while Richard Morgan’s not entirely thoughtless pulpy novels were labeled Pop-culture remains a mystery to me. Maybe Steven Spielberg was considered the master given the book was out as a tie-in to his movie. Then there is Cornerstone for work written in Chinese.

The Cornerstone series has been the only book label that handled trilogies right for Simplified Chinese sci-fi as far as I know. By which I mean authors signed book deals for trilogies usually delivered them within half a decade. Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth Past then shortened to Three-body trilogy between 2006 and 2010 was the one that set the tone.

Funny enough all 4 authors stopped fiddling with trilogy after their deal with Cornerstone. Older authors stopped writing novel altogether while younger ones learnt to take on one volume at a time. However, it was almost not the case…

An author lost (part of) his world

Now the story of how Liu Cixin lost his job. The short version would be lay off. Yes, young, bright eyed and bleed heart self-proclaimed leftists in English speaking regions, we still have those here in PRC. Take a wild guess where did Microsoft’s recent global “bloodbath 2025” start? Hint, it was not Seattle. The longer version is as followed.

The “power plant in Yangquan” mentioned in English introduction of the author was a thermal power plant and not a big one at that. As the environmental policy pivoted towards bigger and more efficient thermal plants to reduce pollution (“Enlarge for less stress on the environment” being the party line), the one old Liu was employed by started shut down process in May, 2007 and was completely out of commission in March, 2009.

To add insult to injury if you ask me, the power plant was reopened as a museum with limited access in early 2023. It was around the time Wandering Earth 2 came to theatres, as if to say that the movie is based on something our former employee wrote. Yep, the corporate habit of using “corpses” as sock puppets is alive and well in miHoYo’s country of origin as well.

Thus, old Liu got full timed into his science fiction novelist endeavor. But as for many laid off, the existential dread alone could have put one complete out. But old Liu somehow managed to channel that dread into the grand finale many were looking forward to. And I guess that could be why he dug the “weeping on Pluto” bit he once considered too melancholy to publish and put it into this book that can be described as Liu’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Three-body Problem ends with someone saying that we will give those alien bastards hell like the locusts give us. Dark Forest, despite the title, ends on a hopeful sunrise. Death’s End ends with a step towards the unknown after oh so many sad and hopeless moments. One laid-off man’s dread can be felt deeply here.

A translator lives in two worlds

Sometimes it’s really comparison made something much better. Take Jack Carr’s Terminal List for example. The book is a boilerplate revenge tale, yet the author’s former Navy Seal experience does add into terrifying details about surveillance state. Yet, the bit where James Reece teaching an investigative journalist how to avoid being watched did not hit until I saw almost the same scene plays out in Netflix’s Punisher with so-called Cold War tradecraft. Before that, it’s the glossary Carr added in a contemporary setting novel that raised my eyebrow.

The younger Ken Liu’s translation is another thing I did not appreciate until I read that yank in Beijing’s much inferior translation of the second book. I thought the Three-body Problem could have been handled by someone who is better at mimicking Arthur C Clark, but young Liu’s handling of Death’s End does resonate with me. Perhaps, as he started to write his first novel at that time, he also improved as a translator of novels.

For one thing, young Liu referred to the thing in the Big Empty as “celestial body”. Being a Chinese speaking Christian myself, I do appreciate how separate astronomical objects are from religious concept. Then there is how he handled Wei Da.

If old Liu has one rut he falls into all too often, it would be the overuse of Wei Da, the Chinese word for “great” or “grand”, even though he only used it 16 times in this book (Character count wise it would be 32 out of around 506000.), it still felt overused. This is just something native Chinese speakers would agree. Ken Liu’s family did not move to the USA until he was ten, so the man still speaks Mandarin as his native tongue. Thus, he can be annoyed by such repetition as well.

Young Liu’s solution would be using different adjectives. There are still 3 “grands” and 5 “greats”. One “great” is used ironically that worked better in English. The context would be a civilian researcher ask the shrink on board a space warship “Why are human so easy to go nut in space, doc?” “Great question!” is only apt answer. It just felt more natural and smooth than “Wei Da De Wen Ti” in Chinese. The rest were all changed to different things: glorious (family), valiant (gesture), famed (warship), tremendous (accomplishment), magnificent (fleet) and heroic (deed).

Meander before Odyssey

Since 2012, Robin Pearce set out to chronicle the thousand-year history of Byzantine in audio form. By July, 2025, the main narrative had finally reached its conclusion with the Ottoman ruthlessly took Constantinople in 1453. While Mr. Pearce was beaten in this "race" by 2 British school teachers’ more tongue-in-cheek approach of the subject matter, it’s a feat nonetheless. The show is modeled after Mike Duncan’s Roman history podcast and it accomplished the goal of providing a similar framework admirably.

Which is to say that as I read Death’s End again in my mid-30s after started listening to HOB podcast, I finally came to appreciate old Liu starting the novel with the Fall of Constantinople and how even people up to some sci-fi bullshit could not save the city for self-proclaimed Romans. When I read the book for the first time as a 20-year-old between Mass Effect 2’s Liar of Shadow Broker and Arrival expansions, the little shit that was my younger self simply yelled “GET ON WITH THE SCI-FI, OLD MAN!” within.

Death’s End’s intention as a bigger sequel partially came with tripling down on Prologue front. Apart from one Byzantine sex worker once touched a higher dimension briefly there is another 2. One, why did the daughter of woman who sold the world committed suicide? The retconned reason is part of this third book’s theme. The second one is a love story about a dumb lad bought his dream girl a star.

Professor Yan Feng of Fudan University compared this bit to something akin to Chiung Yao’s work, something heavily influenced my parents’ generation, in his forewords. But I think the good professor was talking to a readership not familiar with old Liu’s works. This is old Liu up to his bullshit through and through.

Even since his 1999 story With Her Eyes won him his first Galaxy Award, old Liu developed 2 approaches. One being the relentless succession of set pieces that can be seen in Wandering Earth, the 2000 story won him his second Galaxy. The other being letting the point-of-view character exercise their (Usually “his” though.) humanity for a bit before a science fictional concept exploded next to them like a bomb, like it did for Yun Tianming in Death’s End.

Mr. Yun was a researcher had cancer in early 21^st century. One idea of his led to an old college mate having a ludicrous patent so said mate gave him millions. Right at this time, UN started to struggle on space force building front, so a harebrained er, scheme called Stars Our Destination (Nice to see young Liu roping in sci-fi readers into this horseshit with reference to an all-timer.) hatched. The gist of it is pointing at starry sky and say “See that star? You can buy it.”

Yun had a crush on a lass back in college, so he paid UN his new found fortune, got a piece of paper says she now own a distant sun and was ready for his own death. Unknown to him, his life was going to entangle with hers very soon.

Piling on a woman

Unlike Mr. Luo JI in Dark Forest, Ms. Cheng Xin IS the protagonist of Death’s End. After the triple prologue, the book mostly focuses on her. Ms. Cheng is a rocket scientist turned spook. Hold, don’t get too excited, her story is closer to late John Le Carre sad spy blues than early Ian Fleming’s slick tradecraft. It' more about a really sorrowful odyssey trough a very long period of time for the lass.

Oh hi, Dave. Did you think you escaped, you vandalizing piece of shit? I got just one question: who among you “three stooges” and gang came up with the idea of changing “Cheng Xin” to the utterly pointless “Cheng Jin”? Death’s End is dreadful as dreadful gets, and you lot took away the last wordplay on character name. With “Cheng Xin” being “sincere heart” if Cheng is another character.

The surname old Liu chose is composed of a long “crop” on the left side with a small “mouth” topping a medium height “king” on the right. The character for “sincere” or “sincerity” is what Japanese pronounced ”Makoto” and takes 5 more strokes to hand write.

The heart in Ms. Cheng’s given name will bleed a lot before all is said and done. (Beginning with sending her old college mate Yun on a suicide mission to the invading alien fleet.) Which begs the question, why did Benioff and gang pile on the character based on her even more?

Cheng Jin in the show would take notes playing a video game just like Wang Miao in the Thee-body Problem and strangely she was the only one told about zero-sum game in the show, all be it not from the woman who sold the world but an old man recounting his war story. Why wasn’t she on the alien invaders’ shitlist? Hadn't Saul based on Luo Ji suffered enough from that shit awful pun "Do not play with god"?

The book is mainly about her against a real creepy spook named Thomas Wade. In a making it up as he went on way, old Liu only introduced PIA, the clandestine service against the Trisolarian in this final book. Benioff and gang having them as the only thing standing between Earth and San Ti (Those lazy bastards did not even bother to type “trisolaris“!) is just butchering the source materail. Ms. Cheng was recruited to develop probes for this agency and always at odds with Director Wade.

I do wonder if Brad Pitt became an executive producer just so he could play Wade, since the role is not unlike the spooks Pitt’s somewhat mentor figure Robert Redford had played. Even though old Liu wrote that a bearded Wade looks like Hugh Jackman through Cheng Xin’s eyes.

And I guess women in Death’s End is not an aspect Tony Gilroy and crew could handled better. The surviving women by Andor mostly became or remained hardened warriors. Mon Monthma is the closet to a bleed heart who prefer “jaw, jaw” over “war, war”, yet she is the head of Rebel Alliance as we know it by Return of Jedi. Ai AA in this book’s future segment is closer but she is just replacing the long gone Shi Qiang as the telling book’s er, bookish protagonist to get their head out of their ass person of action.

The unfeeling and uncaring nature of Time

I said to Ridley (Scott), “Let’s do it very fast, and do it as simply and profoundly as possible. But also, let (Roy) Batty be a wise guy for a second.” Ridley said “Yes, I like it.” So when we filmed that speech (written by David People), I cut a little bit out of the opening and then improvised these closing lines:” All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

-----Rutger Hauer on his final scene in Blade Runner, according to Future Noir by Paul M. Sammon

So, “Lost in time, like tears in rain” was made up by the late and great Rutger Hauer as a badass one-liner, huh? Or maybe “laconic” is fitting since noticeable Chinese language science fiction epics in the 21^st century all seeming aspire to operate around that line, starting with Death’s End. Even though the jump towards so-called heat death of the universe is bit rushed for my taste, the jumps before it are very effective.

Luo Ji from Dark Forest is the only returning character from previous books. While the sequel bit finally began with the trail of a space ship crew who turned on their fellow men, those characters were all made up for that chapter and this book.

I certainly visualized the older Mr. Luo as the aged male player avatar in Sifu, given that the interface he projects deterrence onto the alien invaders resembles a martial art fight. His wife and daughter being brushed aside into comfort obscurity just confer why I don't think old Liu knew what to do with this family either.

The currently salt and pepper Keanu Reeves would do for a character based on Luo as well. I imagine Luo telling Shi Qiang about the Dark Forest we call universe as a conservation between Reeves and his pal Lawrence Fishburne over cigarettes in the dark. After the former deadpanning through the rules of zero-sum game, the latter just went “Fuck!” Wouldn’t that be the complete and absolutely cinematic reverse of the “desert of real” scene from the Matrix.

People are not the only thing time has effect on in Death’s End. The book let Ms. Cheng cryo sleep through half a dozen different eras in the solar system until it went to hell in a flattening handbasket. The “a man bought her a star” bit paid off as she legged it there after weeping on Pluto with an even older Luo Ji (That is pretty much one playing Sifu on their last leg as a boy.)

If you think the plot above sounds a bit like H G Wells’ Time Machine, my answer would be “Yeah, no shit.” And it’s not like old Liu himself came up with the bullshit for the first time just for this book: Time Migration was allegedly written in the mid-1990s before old Liu sold any of his stories. The novelette is about people cryo sleeping through eras on Earth as the planet changes increasingly unrecognized. The story ends with they arriving at one point of time when its feels like home again. Death’s End simply put it on a cosmos scale.

The first Princeps

The year 2011 saw the second Xing Yun awards for global Chinese language speculative fiction. Or one can call it the true first one given how the winners are presented. Process remains the same, first long-lists, then short-list and finally winners. Only short-listed ones are not called winners and nominees; they are called Gold Medalists and Sliver Medalists akin to Giantbomb’s winners and runners-up. Death’s End was the first Gold Medalists, the very first one to be called “first among equals” if you like.

Xing Yun awards more or less marked the moment Chinese language publishing of literal speculative fiction finally has its counterpart to English’s Hugo and Japanese’ Seiun..Still not so much on the Dramatic Presentation/Audio Visual Media and Graphic Story fronts though. Fun fact, Xing Yun and Seiun are the same characters, though Yun only takes 4 strokes in modern Chinese while Un in Japanese takes a full dozen. It’s heart warming to see that the voting committee there look down hard on modern nationalist wank (Usually about how PRC’s firm hands leads to better result, which many doubts after the 2022 shitshow in Shanghai.) as I saw 2024 long list turned short.

So, seeing this milestone being butchered by David Benioff and gang is pretty disturbing, even though it’s in good company with an ancient epic poem. Legend has it THAT Terry Gillian read 5 pages into Troy script and threw it out. I do wonder if he went WTF over how Achilles being pissed at Agamemnon. I for one had taken the emotional support volume route long before I heard the emotional support phrase. Hollywood is not real, it cannot hurt you, you will always be stone cold classics in your own form until all is lost in time, like tears in rain.

(The End)