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 The Gods have withdrawn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.