The Future is More Terrifying Than We Can Imagine

Half a century into its interstellar escape from Earth, the ship Blue Space stumbles across mysterious ruins of an alien civilization. Strangely, these ruins exist in four dimensions, one more than in our familiar world. Out of curiosity the crew halt their ship, and then make a perilous voyage across higher dimensional space to investigate.

At first the ruins remain impenetrable, until a closer inspection reveals a horrifying truth. These are the tombs of a dead race; and worse, their universe itself is collapsing. The bubble of four dimensional space that Blue Space has encountered is shrinking, falling into three dimensions.

As the ruined marvels of the long dead civilization meet the edge of the bubble they are destroyed, unable to survive in a lower dimension. Before long nothing remains; a million years of history gone forever. Shaken, the crew of Blue Space resume their flight, heading deeper into a dangerous universe.

This dark story is told in Death’s End, the final book of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Technologically advanced civilizations have discovered how to manipulate the laws of physics, resulting in terrible weapons of war. One of these, a weapon that alters the dimensionality of space, has horrifically destroyed the lost civilization encountered by Blue Space.

The resulting possibilities are explored through the plot of the novel. Much attention has been paid to Cixin Liu’s ideas. His Dark Forest theory, the idea that intelligent civilizations should fear each other and conceal their existence, is perhaps the best known concept of his trilogy. But another idea is in his books, one with even deeper implications.

This is the idea that the universe has been shaped by intelligence, much like how the Earth has been shaped by our own civilization. When we look up at the night sky, he speculates, we are not seeing an untouched and pristine wilderness. We are actually seeing the result of billions of years of manipulation; an artificial structure on a grand scale.