2021 science fiction in the Diving Universe series. Everything lands
in the same place all at once.
Many questions about the series are resolved here. It's now clear
who the new faction from Searching For the Fleet are; the modern
Fleet from Thieves turns up too; and the Enterran Empire, the
original political obstacle in the series, gets involved too.
It ends up being a five-sided fight, with nobody having as much
information as they'd like about the other factions, and that's great.
Alas, the people are spread a bit thin; most of the ship captains have
basically the same personality, meticulous about detail, gathering
information before making a choice, finding it hard to trust their
subordinates to do as good a job as they would.
Perhaps it's because they are so similar that I felt it a shame that
everyone's first reaction was to fight, without any attempt at
diplomacy or even communication. (Especially as it seems rather out of
character not to try.) Each side has various wrong assumptions about
the others, and none of those ends up being corrected.
This is also quite a long book at 150,000+ words, and more importantly
one that feels long: there's an awful lot of setting up, considering
this, considering that, worrying, making plans, trying a thing which
doesn't work, making different plans. Combined with a tendency towards
choppy single-sentence paragraphs, I found this hard work to read,
particularly to restart reading after I'd had to do something else;
compare it for example with something like Elliott's Furious Heaven
at twice the length, which I found myself diving back into at every
opportunity.
Definitely not an entry point to the series; at the very least you
should have read those other two books, and ideally the whole thing.
If you're enjoying the series, and I still am, this answers most of
the big puzzles without actually resolving the plots.
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