Andrej Karpathy's Review of Death's End

“I finally finished the Three Body series, as a result of enthusiastic recommendation from several friends, but I emerge disappointed, and even perplexed about the scale of the discrepancy in people’s reception of sci-fi. TLDR: there are several fantastic diamonds of novel ideas sprinkled around, but they are mixed in with a very large mass of goo, full of soulless characters, narrative/logical inconsistencies, poor choices of what to expand on and what to omit, and a really disappointing conclusion. Okay lets get more concrete. **Spoiler alert.** I loved the grand scope of the story - the idea of a dark forest universe (a fun semi-resolution to the Fermi paradox), new physics (although the dimensionality manipulation was stretching it), the idea of fundamental physics as a weapon or a defense (e.g. space folding, or “slow fog”/dark domain), and the idea that there is a huge technological disparity between different civilizations. I also really liked that the story spans a huge amount o