Death's End by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu.

0. This is the second novel that I’ve read this year that was nominated for the 2016 Hugo Awards. The first was The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin, which won, but it wasn’t the best book I’ve read.
—Preamble: Okay, the guiding question to the notes for the two prior books in this series: “I don’t know how much of my confusion is from translational ambiguity, unknown differences in narrative traditions between Western and Chinese stories, or this tale itself being told poorly.” The first book was a mess. I enjoyed the second book. Between reading The Dark Forest and this novel, I asked around for some input. My friend Peter told me that Chinese narrative tradition usually focuses less on plot and character, and more on mood or theme or idea. With that in mind, on to discussing Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy.

1. This novel follows Cheng Xin in her life, pausing when she sleeps in suspended animation, and tracking with history when she is awake. It’s organized in terms of the time periods involved—split between these sections by headers and Cheng Xin's sleep cycles. But she is not just a lens to view the events through, she is a character with some depth. She struggles with guilt pretty heavily, having—in her mind—doomed the whole human race. But her guilt faces off against the reasons she failed at holding off the Trisolar invasion fleet: namely, love and her application of it to the whole world—empathy, or motherly feelings towards the whole human race. (As a reminder, her suspended animation sessions leave her vastly older than the people who surround her every time she wakes.) This central wrinkle to her character is present even before she is elected swordholder: her failures and successes all hinge on her empathy and brilliant contributions to science. For instance, one of the things she does earlier in the book, not her failure as a swordholder, leaves her thinking:

She had done nothing that she ought to be ashamed of, nothing that should trouble her conscience. But she also understood that this was how someone could sell their mother to a whorehouse.

This central wrinkle of intertwined guilt and love carries a lot of the book, and it is partly solved near the end when prior swordholder, and total badass, Lou Ji forgives her by saying,

“Love isn’t wrong. A single individual cannot destroy a world. If that world was doomed, then it was the result of the efforts of everyone, including those living and those who had already died.”

This time, she cried not only for Tianming. She cried out of a sense of surrender. She finally understood how she was but a mote of dust in a grand wind, a small leaf drifting over a broad river. She surrendered completely and allowed the wind to pass through her, allowed the sunlight to pierce her soul.

She finally comes to terms with her actions after this conversation with an aged Lou Ji, perhaps the man who has the most reason to not forgive her. But that tension does not entirely leave—like it did in the weird section of the second book. Rather, her personal tension over Yun Tianming—the terminal cancer patient whose brain she sends to the stars—and her tension over the fate of humanity still doesn’t leave. So, this conversation with Lou Ji becomes merely a way for her to look at this event, this failure as a swordholder, in a different way; a way for her to learn the proper places of empathy and love and guilt. Yet, she still feels that her empathy applies to every human: her failure to save one, Yun Tianming, still haunts her for most of the book.

Even though both crews were in the cold vastness of space, voyaging in the same direction at approximately the same speed, the natures of their voyages were completely different. Gravity had a spiritual anchor, while Blue Space was adrift.

2. A couple of secondary characters also held my interest: Wade and Sophon. Sophon is an animatronic embodiment of Trisolaris. She embodies the other side of Cheng Xin’s empathy: not caring for the individual human, but for humanity as a whole. What is best for the whole is what is best for the one, even the one who has to die. At one point, during the resettlement of all humanity to Australia, humans are swarming a supply drop, at which point Sophon jumps out of a helicopter onto the pile, and takes out a katana, killing a few of the refugees. Then,

Sophon jumped back onto the pile and pointed at the line with her bloody katana. “The era for humanity’s degenerate freedom is over. If you want to survive here, you must relearn collectivism and retrieve the dignity of your race!”

In other words, Sophon views collectivism in light of empathy for the whole instead of the individual. She sees the necessity for all rather than one. Sure, she doesn’t much care for humanity, but her statements seem more in line with realism, or reasonable action for a group in extreme situations.
—Wade, on the other hand, exemplifies a brash, results driven, buck the rules when you can get away with it, Western stereotype. The line I quoted earlier references selling one’s mother to a whorehouse, which is something he believes is a positive in his secretive, espionage based career. He tries to murder Cheng Xin mostly because he believes she will fail as a swordholder, but maybe partly because he wants that prestige and power. In some sense he echoes Sophon in this group-focused, screw the individual mindset. But he seems more selfish in his application: rather than shouting, “relearn collectivism” while waving a bloody sword at a bunch of refugees, he tries to shield Cheng Xin from the necessities of selling one’s mother to the whorehouse, while still being willing to sell his own mother to a whorehouse. Like Sophon, Wade acts like a foil to Cheng Xin. And he gets really interesting when he ends up aligning with Cheng Xin in some aspects later in the novel.

It appeared that there were other low-entropy entities with even sharper intuition than he; but that wasn’t strange. It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.

3. The writing alternates between the plot, characters, and themes—but also scientific exposition of these fantastical goings on. For instance, all of the solar system is turned into a two-dimensional area of space. Don’t ask me how it works, but Liu Cixin will tell you:

As soon as the Sun began to two-dimensionalize, a circle expanded on the plane. Soon, the planar Sun’s diameter exceeded the diameter of the remaining part of the Sun. This process took only thirty seconds. Based on the mean solar radius of seven hundred thousand kilometers, the rim of the two-dimensional Sun grew at the rate of twenty thousand kilometers per second. The planar Sun continued to grow, forming a sea of fire on the plane, and the three-dimensional Sun sank slowly into this blood-red sea of fire.

These expositional, scientific portions are less engaging to me, but if you really liked Seveneves, then these portions will be right up your alley. Narrative maths is not what gets me hot about writing. The rest of the writing is fine. More fine than the translation of The Three-Body Problem. Less interesting than the translation for The Dark Forest.
—A problem with the structure of eras is that each new awakening by Cheng Xin needs a couple of pages of exposition to catch the reader, and Cheng Xin herself, up to the present. It’s told in the classic amnesia trope and gives the book an uneviable, stop and go pacing. One of these portions I noted was this:

Ever since the Great Ravine, although history had taken multiple big turns, humanity, as a whole, had always lived in a society that was highly democratic, with ample welfare. For two centuries, the human race had held on to a subconscious consensus: No matter how bad things got, someone would step in to take care of them. This faith had almost collapsed during the disastrous Great Resettlement, but on that darkest of mornings six years ago, a miracle had nonetheless taken place. They were waiting for another miracle.

By having clear headers for each new section, Liu Cixin effectively billboards the pacing, but the reliance on exposition doesn’t keep the whole flowing in a way I appreciate as a Westerner.
—The only other annoyance with the writing is a translational thing of not transliterating two names throughout the book: two people have a Chinese character in their name. This is a book published in English, and it makes sense to get as close in English in the translation, not leave some Chinese characters in there for the reader to try and remember. I had a couple of deaths in the family while reading this book, and did not remember how the Chinese characters were supposed to be pronounced when I returned to this novel.

What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.

4. The mood oscillates between hope and despair. Some of the discussions deal with these topics too, but to me the main theme is what makes humans human—though this comes out in part through their experiences of hope and despair. This theme makes sense as it’s related to Cheng Xin’s central tensions and the novel follows her, but it’s also a book with both aliens and humans in it, so that humanity question seems destined to come up. Where this theme became most interesting to me was in the way humans apply love: to the whole or to the parts, like the difference between Wade, Sophon, and Cheng Xin. The reason this thread interests me the most is because it’s the most varied: both positives and negatives are shown for all three main sides to this argument, and these three examples are shown against a background of selfishness and other points of view like Lou Ji and Ai AA. Cheng Xin endangers the world, killing millions through her actions which are based on love, but she is torn apart by her guilt; Sophon kills individuals to help the whole, but never makes many close, personal connections and seems to regret that lack; Wade endangers trends within humanity, but allows his personal connections to undo most of his plans. These complex glimpses of applying love sustain much of my interest in the novel.
—The novel also ties up the themes from the prior two novels—Dark Forest thinking is obliterated by both the four dimensional alien encounter, and the three dimensional alien bombing team that leaves the solar system two dimensional, tying it into the entropic nature of matter; while the hopelessness that has been dogging the whole series is finally banished by both the Galactic Humans and faster than light traveling Cheng Xin, because though humans end up making a wrong choice about how to avoid dark forest strikes, they still manage to survive and thrive.

He waved his cane around in a circle. “At every moment in history, you can find endless missed opportunities.”

“Like life,” said Cheng Xin softly.

“Oh, no no no.” Luo Ji shook his head vigorously. “At least not for me. I don’t think I’ve missed anything, haha.” He looked at Cheng Xin. “Child, do you think you’ve missed out? Then don’t let opportunities go by again in the future.”

5. In all, I think I’ve finally answered my central question with these books. After reading Death’s End, I cast about and came across a 1977 collection of essays usefully named Chinese Narrative, published by Princeton, which helped contextualize my friend Peter’s helpful statement about the topic:

Chinese stories and novels no doubt belonged to a minor tradition rather than to the central elite culture of historiography, philosophical prose, and lyric verse. [...] One problem is certainly unique to the Western reader. Conditioned by his own culture, he has certain expectations that Chinese fiction will not necessarily meet. The kind of suspense he is used to may not occur. Concluding chapters may give a sense of anticlimax instead of a resounding resolution to the action. Rather than develop, individual characters may appear throughout a work as “whole” as they will ever be. [...] Even the category of novel as such may be inappropriate to the fiction of China prior to the twentieth century.
(Foreword by Cyril Birch)

These essays further imply that some plots can be chronicles instead of leading the reader along a concise plot like Western novels do. This makes sense in regards to the first novel and my reaction. After reading this third novel, I believe I have answered this central guiding question:
● First, Ken Liu’s translation of the first book is ambiguous, but not terrible in terms of reflecting the Chinese narrative tradition. He is better as a translator here. I’ve read his published book of short stories and have many of the same complaints about his writing there as I do his translation here.
● Second, the story strikes an engaging balance between Western and Chinese narrative traditions: this third book is less Western than the middle book, and less Chinese than the first. Yet the tale itself may be no greater or worse than any other Hugo winner, an awards tradition that is as full of hits as it is misses.
● Third, I think Liu Cixin is not a great writer, but he has a shotgun blast’s way of embedding interesting ideas and discussions into his works that I enjoy. And there are a couple of phrases here or there that do make for nice touches. Like this paragraph:

Cheng Xin was taken aback by the chaotic arrangement of the pipes. It wasn’t the result of carelessness; on the contrary, to create this kind of utter chaos required great effort and design. The arrangement seemed to find even the hint of a pattern to be taboo. This suggested an aesthetic utterly at odds with human values: Patterns were ugly, but the lack of order was beautiful.

—In short, I like this book, but it isn’t perfect. The pacing annoys me, as do the scientific exposition sections; but Cheng Xin carries many of these annoyances out of mind with her depth, which Liu uses to set up the main theme of the novel. It’s a strong final novel, even if the ending is a little cosmically “so what?” The whole series starts with an ant crawling on a tombstone, and ends with the universe barreling towards heat death, a progressive expansion of scope that I do appreciate as a writing tactic because Liu Cixin keeps cutting from micro to macro and back. I look forward to reading Liu Cixin in the future, and to watching Ken Liu grow as a translator. But I’m not going to immediately buy the next Liu Cixin novel that hits America until I’m in the right mood. Though I am glad that I now have some experience with Chinese narrative tradition to base future book buying decisions off of. I should finally read Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

“But we’ve long been called on to think about matters that belonged to the province of God.” They sat by the brook until the moon turned into the sun again.

+++

All my life has been spent climbing up a flight of stairs made of responsibility. When I was little, my only duty was to study hard and obey my parents. Later, in high school and college, the responsibility to study hard continued, but there was also the added obligation to make myself useful rather than a drain on society.

The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin

0. This is the first book I've read that was nominated for the Hugo Awards for 2016 publishing dates. I read this before it was nominated.

1. Jemisin's writing has improved. She still lets young-old Hoa tell you the second part of this tale. Where the last novel was split into three main families of chapters, woven together intricately, this one is split into two chapter groups, mostly alternating: Hoa addressing Essun in the second person, telling her what she did; and somebody telling the reader about Nassun in the third person—which I assume is Hoa speaking to Essun about Nassun, but don’t know for certain.
—Like in the last novel, there are brief interludes where Hoa adopts the first person to explain what he did and where, while Essun is either incapacitated or elsewhere.
—The second person Essun chapters exhibit a different voice than the third person sections show—I mean in word choices and sentence structures rather than in the point of view. For instance, this chosen-at-random, third person passage from a Nassun chapter:

She ignores him. The chain is welded to a loop at the end of the shaft. She fingers it and thinks hard, now that the strange man’s appearance has broken her deadlock. (Her hand’s shaking, though. She takes a deep breath, trying to get hold of her own fear. Somewhere off in the trees, there is a gurgling groan, and a scream of fury.) She knows Jija has some of his stoneknapping tools in his pack, but the harpoon is steel.

As you can see, we’ve got a variety of verbs and sentence structures. This is writing I like, and this is just a random section the book fell open to. There are a couple of to be verbs, but a couple help the reader feel familiar, or comfortable. However, the second person sections have a much higher percentage of to be verbs. Here is another chosen-at-random section, this time from an Essun chapter:

You’re keeping well back because the room smells of mildew and body odor and because you think you see something moving in the water along with her shed hair. Tonkee may have needed to wear filth as a part of her commless disguise, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t actual filth. ‘A moon,’ you say. It’s a strange word, brief and round; you’re not sure how much to stretch out the oo sound in the middle.

A third of the verbs are to be here, and some of the others are the common do/does or has/have. Let's take another at-random passage from an Essun chapter:

You’re in line to pick up your household’s share for the week when you hear the first whisper. It’s not directed at you, and it’s not meant to be overheard, but you hear it anyway because the speaker is agitated and forgets to be quiet.

Fifty-fifty between to be verbs and not to be verbs in this passage. Comparing random third and second person passages, I see Jemisin writing in two quite different voices—one relying on the to be verb, the other involving the rest of the dictionary more often. This creates a strange reaction for me: having read the last novel, I know Essun already, I already care about her and her story; yet I enjoy reading Nassun’s story more here, despite not really caring about Nassun herself until the very last eight words of the novel. Nassun's chapters provide more variety.
—But Jemisin breaks up the to be monopoly of Essun's chapters by using the familiar verbs to ground some experimental writing showing: Essun's mental break, Essun in the process of undoing everything she knows, Essun trying desperately to collate as much as possible faster than possible, Essun coming to grips with mistakes she hadn’t known she had made. For instance:

The smoky quartz. The amethyst, your old friend, plodding after you from Tirimo. The kunzite. The jade.
oh
The agate. The jasper, the opal, the citrine . . .
You open your mouth to scream and do not hear yourself.
The ruby the spodumene THE AQUAMARINE THE PERIDOT THE
“It’s too much!” You don’t know if you’re screaming the words in your mind or out loud. “Too much!”

Jemisin uses italics, capitals, paragraph breaks, and bold letters (I think I remember those being in here somewhere) with these fractured, jumping sentences in order to convey the sheer change in Essun—much like CJ Cherryh uses the same tactic for the same reasons and goals in Tripoint. Here it’s a bit odd because it’s Hoa telling this story, while Essun is the one fractured mentally. Why does the way Hoa tells it fracture as well? He is still mentally intact. But it doesn’t bother me any. It communicates well.
—My biggest gripe with the last novel was word choices—a mix of colloquial and formal that just didn’t work for me. Here, it almost always works because she seems to tone down both the colloquial and the formal. There are no discordant mixes, outside of two lines I can remember—the first line of the novel, “Hm. No. I’m telling this wrong.” And the title of the penultimate chapter, “you get ready to rumble”, which makes me think that maybe Jemisin did intend the hockey pun in the last book’s title. Though there seem to be more uses of these internal, self-referencing terms unique to this novel—comm, still, orogeny, stonelore, et cetera. I’m fine with technobabble, or in this case magicobabble, but Jemisin uses it so often that when I took an unavoidable break from this book for a couple of weeks, there were a couple of terms and names I didn’t remember when I had gotten back to it.

2. And that’s the biggest thing to say here: this novel does not stand on its own. It’s a sequel, but I think sequels are opportunities, not excuses. What I mean is this: I read The Fifth Season last year, in May. Now, eight and a half months later, some of this language is just lost on me. Sure, she has an appendix in the back, but that’s a rare enough thing that I didn’t even suspect that there would be one back there, then felt stupid for being minutely frustrated through most of the novel. This isn’t a sequel in that nothing happens and it just sets up for the next book—though there is some of that here, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment: every chapter has something happening that progresses the story or builds the characters. Nassun is a new character, Essun is changing, Antimony and Hoa and Ykka are important and changing. Just because Essun is transforming and learning doesn’t mean it’s a dull read. I prefer this type of book to a montage. I was engaged throughout. But it is a book that you have to have read the first one to understand, and that's a weakness.

3. I was initially disappointed at magic. I did not end up disappointed, but when it was first revealed I thought, “Oh boy, here comes the midichlorians moment. Tell me about the mystic secret inner workings of the mystic secret inner workings. Ugh.” Where the last book has this unique orogeny stuff, now there’s something under the orogeny? And it’s magic? Again? Ugh. Why?
—Pixar makes great films because you are only asked to suspend your disbelief once, in the first ten minutes, and then everything else follows. (Except Up, which has talking dogs randomly appear much later, but that’s why Up’s their worst film.) As an author, Jemisin already had me, I was already tracking and interested. Why throw me another bone? I didn’t want it. I wanted to learn more about the bones I already had. For instance, learning more about the stone eaters was great. Learning about Schaffa and the guardians more fascinated me. Learning more about the history of Jemisin’s world reminded me why I love these books so much. Learning that there’s also magic was a letdown.
—But the reason I am not annoyed by magic at the end is because she uses magic to show how it hides the truth or distracts from it; to allow Ykka and Nassun to be almost equal to Essun in their own ways; to show how orogeny is really just a way to keep people down, racially; to make Essun change. So yeah, it’s annoying and probably didn’t need to be there, but at least it does something useful while it's there, and helps progress some of Jemisin’s arguments. So, sure, it’s fine.

The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

4. So, reading back through the preceding three notes, I don’t really dig into why I love this sequel, despite it not having legs of its own. First and foremost, Jemisin creates some really good characters. And by allowing them all to interact so often and in such a variety of situations, I understand them well.
—Essun is explicitly explained by Hoa and Alabaster: desperate for love and affection, yet wary of it because of all the deaths she has caused with those she loves in the past. She’s scared and pissed at the same time. She’s hurting and longing to hurt. She’s a punk rocker in the sense of burning everything down, but can easily convince herself to help build, as long as it's different. She’s explained through actions, dialogue, and Hoa’s version of her interior monologue.
—Alabaster tries to keep Essun on task, and doesn’t quite know how to do that. So he tries love, anger, and everything in between. This is all shown in his actions. He’s dying, but he’s okay with that, and that solid acceptance of reality allows him to be a nice foil for Essun’s struggles. He’s shown almost exclusively through his actions, though he is stuck in one place for the whole book, legless.
—Hoa, Steel, and Antimony are all a revelation, a peek into the stone eaters’ culture that is fascinating and expands what was there before. They’re mysterious still, but they’re mysterious in a certain direction, and I want to know where it’s heading. Steel is the slick used car salesman who wants to lead things to his idea of a better place. Hoa is the one who needs love, and he is fiercely loyal when it is shown to him. Antimony is attracted to power, and she’ll help tirelessly if she knows there’s a reward at the end of it.
—Ykka understands people and how to use them or convince them to work towards her purpose. But she also resents some of her duties and is anxious about both her personal future, and the future of the community—and anxious about her own priorities between these two anxieties. These come out through both her actions and her words, but mostly her words.

5. Second, the world building, which I praised at length in my notes for the last book, is also strong here. It doesn’t lay such a broad foundation, but when it works best is when it expands what was already there to begin with, when it deepens the reader’s understanding of mysteries already in the world. Talking about the guardians, stone eaters, and history builds off of what was present in the first book, and I really appreciate a deeper look at this world.

6. That said, the focus of this book is more on the micro-experiences of Essun and Nassun changing, so it lacks the consistent micro-macro interplay that made the last novel so good. Where the theme of the last one is about this interplay between the culture, climate, and people—a call towards working together in understanding—the theme of this one is more about familial relationships. Essun, Ykka, and Nassun are all dealing with family issues. Essun needs to ignore Nassun in order to save the world, Ykka needs to prove to her family that parts of her family are useful, Nassun needs to kill her father in order to survive. But outside of these goals, Essun broods on all the death she has caused in her own family. Ykka kills Cutter in order to save the rest. Nassun kills a whole town in order to keep Schaffa safe. The point being that everything is a choice, and every choice has an upside and a downside. Every good act comes at a cost, and every bad act also comes at a cost. That’s what Jemisin argues here.

“No vote. Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

7. In all, I am so excited for the third book to come out in August. It’s the top of my list for 2017, tied with Ann Leckie’s unannounced but heavily hinted at new project. Yes, this wasn’t the greatest book I’ve read, but it was a fascinating journey that ended in an appetite-whetting place. A place where Essun doesn’t know about the surprise stone fist that the reader knows about, a slippery slope heading towards a showdown between mother and daughter, and more space for Jemisin to explain this intricate world. I know this isn’t the best writing, but Jemisin improved her writing here, and I really appreciate that. I understand the story seems to meander before a sudden rush to the titular gate at the end, but it held my attention through the changes the world and characters were undergoing. This book travels a long way from start to finish, and almost nothing on that journey dampened my interest, excitement, or enthusiasm.