Mountain of Black Glass

Executive Summary: Things are really picking up in the 3rd of this 4 volume doorstopper.

Audio book: Another excellent job by George Newbern. With books as long as these, it's important to have a good narrator, and thankfully they've made a good choice. Clear, good volume, good inflections and a variety of voices making the audio a good choice.

Full Review
Both the previous two books in this series suffer from slower parts, and this one was no different. However, I found this one to have the fewest number of slow parts yet.

We finally start to get answers to many of the questions I've had since the first volume. Additionally the pace seems much better. Everything feels more important to the story and the characters journey for answers and not just some exercise in writing for the author.

The prose are once again excellent and I find myself increasingly attached to the characters. This is especially true of Orlando, Fredricks and !Xabbu. Renie who got on my nerves at times in the last book, was much less so in this book. Paul's plotline provides some of the best reveals of the series thus far, but I found myself a bit less interested in him as I was in the previous two books.

In this novel we start to finally get some convergence of several plotlines that had previously felt only loosely related to one another. We get yet even more new sim worlds to explore, but thankfully they don't seem to be explored for exploration's sake, but with real purpose to the plot. Many of the minor plotlines are starting to finally feel more important as well.

Unlike the previous two, where I found it was easy to take a break with something shorter/lighter, there was no way I couldn't jump into the fourth and final book with how this ends. Overall this has been a pretty enjoyable series for me and I'll be curious to see how Mr. Williams wraps it all up.