Cixin Liu: Death's End

ISBN (TPB) 9781784971649

ISBN (E) 9781784971625

Jacket illustration: © Stephen Martiniere

Author Photo: Li Yibo

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Translator’s Note: The Chinese full stop punctuation mark looks like this: 。

Translator’s Note: Some Anglophone readers may get the impression here that the Chinese name for our galaxy is also “Milky Way.” It is not. The actual Chinese name for the galaxy is Yinhe, or “Silver River.” All Chinese students, however, study English for years.

Translator’s Note: This is a name written in a mix of Chinese characters and English letters. The “艾” is the surname and is pronounced “Ai.”

Translator’s Note : A famous artistic community in Beijing housed in abandoned military factory buildings. Artists began to congregate there in the 1990s.

Translator’s Note: This style of Chinese tunic suit is usually known in the West as the “Mao suit.” I’ve chosen to use a literal translation of the Chinese term to avoid unintended connotations. Sun Zhongshan (or Sun Yat-Sen) was the founder of the Republic of China, the predecessor state to the People’s Republic of China on the mainland.

Translator’s Note: The poem is by Xu Yunuo (1894–1958), a modern Chinese poet most prominently associated with the May Fourth Movement.

Translator’s Note: Like “艾 AA,” “高 Way” is a mixed Chinese-English name (“高” is the surname and pronounced “Gao”).

Translator’s Note: The surname “白” is pronounced “Bai.”

Translator’s Note: This is the pinyin romanization of the original fully Chinese name: “白 艾思.”

Translator’s Note: This is a wordplay in Chinese. 幕 (mu), or “curtain,” is a pun for 墓 (mu), or “tomb.”

Translator’s Note: Some Anglophone readers may raise an eyebrow at this assertion. The common description of Chinese characters—the script this novel was originally written in—as “ideograms” is inaccurate. The Chinese script is phonetic, like almost every other script still in use, though it still contains a few (very few) ideographic elements that have survived through the ages. An introduction to how Chinese characters really function may be found in John DeFrancis’s Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.