cavalary's reviews
269 reviews

This is the end of certainly one of the very best series that I ever read. The story is interesting, the pacing is extremely intense, with next to no filler and very, very little that doesn't actually drive the story forward, and any complaints that may in all fairness be made regarding character development and the huge amount of extremely lucky events that happen to the characters easily get forgotten.
As for the very end... It's a whirlwind of action, a chain nightmare, a series of fever dreams which has been building up all along and suddenly explodes in your face, leaving you gaping and grasping at it, trying, perhaps in vain, to come to terms with all that's going on. When it's all over, all too soon, you'll probably still be at least somewhat confused and perhaps, as Mery put it, "feel a better kind of sad".

Rather surprisingly for Modesitt, there's practically no mention of the environment and ecology in this book. There's also little put forward regarding how a future society should function. There is, however, plenty of talk about, or in fact against, religion, as well as much about certain other defining characteristics of humanity, so it's certainly still Modesitt, largely wrapping philosophy in space opera in order to get some ideas across to a wider audience.
What I can say about the book is that I liked how it went perhaps somewhat into Rama territory but had next to nothing of the human filth that made me loathe those books. Or it still had a fair bit of it, seeing what its purpose was, but it was presented in a way that I could not just stomach but actually even enjoy, mostly. And the contrast between Chang's and Fitzhugh's chapters was quite refreshing, as were the four different viewpoints in general.

Though any amount is far more than I'd like, there was surprisingly little "human filth" to be found in this part of the series. The focus is instead exactly where it should be, with dragons that are really coming into their own, reaching their potential both in how they act and in how they're presented, and battles that are depicted wonderfully.
I must also note that, while the author has raced through a lot of potential action, seeming to only want to depict that which was particularly meaningful, the effort to take a shot at several important issues that the world is still facing is still obvious and, I believe, largely successful.

The subtitle is "A Novel of Temeraire" and it does indeed feel almost like a side-story, being restricted in scope, quite removed from the overall plot and at times appearing to lack in content, the author seeming to struggle for inspiration in a few moments. But at least the dragons are still interesting and the amount of human filth was reduced thanks to their very limited contact with others through a large part of the story, so anyone who liked the series so far certainly shouldn't shy away from this book either.

Good enough for a short SF book. Shows that it was meant to be an even shorter story, as it says at the beginning, because it basically only follows a character, with a second added in a couple of places, and gives little detail about the world, but it does its job and sends some messages to those willing to listen. Also, all the little poems supposedly written by Mustapha placed at the beginning of each chapter can fall under "words of wisdom" anytime.