Death's End

This is where the bill arrives for everything the first two books managed to put off. It runs from a dying man’s brain being fired at the Trisolaran fleet as a spy, through the fifteen minutes it takes for deterrence to fall apart completely, to the Solar System being flattened from three dimensions down to two by something that isn’t even attacking us specifically, it’s just tidying up. The scale gets properly bonkers; millions of years, the heat death, the shape of the universe itself treated as a thing wars get fought with rather than in. Three fairy tales carry the most important information in the book. Cheng Xin makes what looks like the right call every single time and it goes badly every single time, which I suspect is the point.

If you don’t understand that nothing matters by the end of this, you’ve missed out. But if you understand that and are smiling anyway then you’ve got what Liu was trying to tell us from the start.