great design. Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past is not featured here but stakes a claim - trilogy ends at the very end of time itself, with the protagonists contriving a way to survive the big bang into the next universe to be born

> survive the big bang into the next universe to be born

That's also in Poul Anderson's Tau Zero. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240617.Tau_Zero) I vaguely remember that theme in a few other stories.