RogerBW's Blog

2023 science fiction, last of its series. The Gods have withdrawn their protection from the planet Jai, just as the Keres is coming. What can Yasira Shien and her band of renegades do?

There's one big revelation here, about the nature of the Keres; I confess I didn't find it much of a surprise, but fortunately the book is more about people's reactions to it than it is about the thing itself. (And those people are starting from a place in which it would be much more shocking than it is to me.)

So the revolutionary cell has to work with the resources they have to try to save the planet, even if they'd really rather not rely on people who've proven self-interested before. The ethics of rebellion come up repeatedly, and it's always good to see this given more thought than "us good, them bad, us fight them".

Which also spreads to the flashbacks of how the Gods got their start, desperate projects to try to save life on Earth by giving everything over to the AIs, and whether that was the right thing to do: it produced the survival of humanity, yes, but also as it turned out centuries of tyranny.

It's great fun as well as cosmic in scope and implications, and nobody is forgotten. It has been my joy and privilege to spend time with these people. This would have been a worthy nominee for the Best Series Hugo.