A struggle for me to get into, although I'm not sure whether that's because I'm out of practice with space opera or not! I won't be picking up the rest of this series but I won't go out of my way to avoid any other Gary Gibson stuff that crosses my path.

This third and final book in the Nova War sequence is a disappointment, mainly because, instead of improving further on the quality gains made in the second book, this one falls backward. Early on there is a major plot point that makes a horrendous continuity error and the book never really recovers. It also seems to lack any coherent message, unlike it's predecessors.

It's some time since I finished this book and I don't really have anything else to say about it. The fact is there are better writers of space opera amongst Gibson's contemporaries, even if all you want is an exciting thriller, and I would recommend you seek them out: Neal Asher, Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds are all much better on the average.

This probably rates around 2.5 stars for me overall, mostly likely because I expected more from it than what the text provided. I appreciated the short interview at the end of the collection, and the fact that this provides an overarching look at Gibson's writing career and some parts of his personal life and motivations, it made the text worth reading. However, I found the narrative a bit more difficult to get through than I expected. I read many academic texts and I'll admit that I learned many things in this that I didn't know about Gibson's life before, but I honestly didn't see that much passion in the narrative within this text. It felt a bit lacking and dry in the presentation of the material, and it's not necessarily a text you would want to peruse if you wanted a more comprehensive examination of Gibson's individual works and contributions. It's good for a short reference, and definitely organizes the material as far as his contributions of poetry, in fanzines, short stories, screenplays, and his novels, but somehow it left me wanting more when the narrative was all said and done.

Good for a quick reference, but not so much for a comprehensive resource for a man who's contributed remarkable work.

Overall score: 2.5/5 stars

Note: I received this as an ARC from NetGalley, from the publisher University of Illinois Press.

This book expires sometime tomorrow so this gets bumped up on my reading list - I'll probably finish it before I go to sleep.  

I'm going to do an ARC approvals and a new Weekly Reading list sometime in the morning/afternoon.

This sequel to Stealing Light fixes many of its predecessor's problems; distractingly overt reference to other books is absent, as is clumsy foreshadowing and very predictable plotting. This makes it much better, but there are still some problems, mainly at the detailed sentence level of occasional poor grammar and bad phrasing.

The over-arching theme of both books (with at least one more to come) seems to be about nuclear proliferation and who should be allowed to control such devastating weapons. Of course in the books, its bombs that detonate entire stars, but still...Should older, more mature societies suppress everybody else? Is that idea patronising? Who can be trusted? Gibson's answer seems to be an independent body not bound to any particular political body or doctrine. This immediately raises in my mind the question, who watches the watchers? Maybe Gibson examines this in the third volume, which, if it shows continued improvement might be very good.