Le Guin rewriting The Lord of the Flies for the quantum age, that's because it strongly comes across that way. We have left the dreary ground and returned to the freedom of the trees, we have shrugged off the clothes of hypocrisy and grown luxurious down coats.' If this sounds like Ursula K. The book embraces social satire, absurdly outlining a future where 'human civilization has returned to its childhood, to a happy, civilized age. There's a raft of them, mostly belonging to a middle-school class in Beijing, and revolving around a boy named Huahua who finds himself at the center of earth-shattering events - not to mention the pressure to reassemble the world so that it not only regains its former functionality, but surpasses it in terms of moral mandate.īook Reviews 'Death's End' Brings An Epic Trilogy To A Satisfying Close Instead of rigorously hard sci-fi like the Remembrance trilogy, Supernova Era dwells more on the characters. But that works, because the physics of this apocalyptic phenomenon is not the focus of the story. Liu renders the science behind this conceit clearly yet concisely, as if to get it out of the way early before its implausibility sinks in too deep.

That is, if they're able to survive in the first place. Only children are left behind - and it's up to them to pick up the adults' tools and rebuild civilization.

Rather than tackling the astrophysics and metaphysics of the cosmos, this relatively compact, standalone book zooms in on a sociopolitical scenario that's sparked by a simple yet frightening premise: A nearby yet previously hidden star goes supernova, and its unleashed radiation kills everyone over the age of 13. His latest novel to be published in the United States, Supernova Era, was actually written years before the Remembrance books, and accordingly, it's far less ambitious in scale. In Cixin Liu's sprawling, Hugo Award-winning Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, the acclaimed Chinese author played a multidimensional mind game that was complex enough to boggle even the most astute science-fiction reader. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Supernova Era Author Cixin Liu

Supernova book review