The bones of the premise are nothing new, but Liu continues to elaborately dress them. But this new age of peace and technological prosperity is a precarious one, as she discovers when she's charged with maintaining Earth's defenses against an enemy that isn't going to give up so easily. The world she finds is not the one she remembers: The alien Trisolarans - who hadn't yet reached Earth in her time - are now locked in a détente with humanity, thanks to an ingenious deterrent (which forms the core of The Dark Forest's plot). Parallels Cultural Revolution-Meets-Aliens: Chinese Writer Takes On Sci-Fi In this case, it's Cheng Xin, a rocket scientist from our era revived from artificial hibernation half a century in the future. Like the two installments before it, Death's End focuses on a different protagonist. As trilogy-cappers go, it's satisfying - entirely on its own terms, though. Now, Remembrance of Earth's Past has come to a close with Death's End. The Three-Body Problem was followed in 2015 by the equally challenging and rewarding The Dark Forest. Set in the near past as well as the near future, it depicts the first contact between a Chinese physicist and an alien race whose interest in Earth is less than benign - a timeworn idea that Liu rendered with complexity, nuance, and plenty of head-spinning astrophysics. Not only was The Three-Body Problem - first published in China in 2008 before being translated into English by acclaimed American author Ken Liu - an exquisitely epic novel, it was a fascinating window into how science fiction has evolved in a culture different than our own. When The Three-Body Problem, the first installment of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, it drove home a big point: Science fiction from other countries has been overlooked too long here in the U.S., and it's to everyone's benefit to fix that. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Death's End Author Cixin Liu

The three body trilogy