Death’s End (2016) by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu, is the staggering final act of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy that elevates Chinese science fiction to cosmological grandeur. This masterpiece stretches across 18 million years of civilization’s struggle against the universe’s ruthless Darwinism, where humanity’s survival hinges on increasingly desperate technologies: light-speed curvature propulsion, pocket universes, and the terrifying dimensional strikes that fold spacetime itself into weapons. The novel’s most brilliant stroke comes through fairy tale allegories—a princess’s story about a magical umbrella becomes the key to understanding relativistic warfare, embodying Liu’s unique fusion of poetic imagination and theoretical physics.

The 2016 Tor Books first edition, with its black jacket shimmering under a gold-foil singularity, remains the definitive English version, preserving both the unedited translation and Liu’s haunting afterword about science fiction’s role in China’s cultural awakening. Unlike later printings, this original includes the complete fold-out timeline tracing humanity’s trajectory from the Crisis Era to the Universe’s heat death. For collectors, the true prize is the ultra-rare signed edition distributed at Liu’s early U.S. appearances, often inscribed with his characteristic “宇宙很大” (“The universe is vast”) epigram. A work that makes galaxies feel claustrophobic and eons fleeting, Death’s End redefined the scale of modern speculative fiction.

For fans of cosmological SF: