Terminal Peace

It was interesting. The tone changed from the early book, not drastically, but enough. I still really enjoyed it, and there was still silly shenanigans, but as the author mentioned at the end, he changed, both due to covid, and family health issues.

I enjoyed it for different reasons I enjoyed the earlier books. And it does feel like a kinda satifying ending, but be warned, its not as silly.

Usually this would be the point that I say that the time it took me to read this book is not an indication of how much I enjoyed it, but taking nearly six weeks to read this book is an indication that I did not enjoy it at all. In fact, if this hadn't been the final in the series, I would have happily DNF'd at the 40% point and moved on. But no, I had to finish it because I wanted to know how things ended.

(Anticlimactically, and making me dislike the universe as a whole and the majority of named characters in this story. I do like Kumar, at least somewhat and appreciate his morals and him taking a stand (several times) over them. I am curious about Gabe and would have loved to see Kate actually have the emotional thrust that his storyline should have had. The actual ‘plan' before the plan went to pieces as it is wont to do for this crew was, to put it bluntly, craptastic and I hate Mops just a little for thinking that was the solution.)

Look, I honestly thought the book was terrible. Not terrible in the ‘it never should have been published' way, but in the ‘I know the author is better than this' way, and that hurts. Especially because at one point, Hines would have been on my very short list of favorite authors. (Like top 3-4 material.) (The more books of his I read, the less I like him work since I finished his Princess series.)

But this book is...honestly, I think it's nothing. It's cardboard science fiction. It's not funny enough to be humorous, which is something that I'm surprised by knowing Hines' work.

It takes no time to develop characters (even less than the previous two in this series). By this point we should know these people, but I still don't know anything about Mops. Kumar gets a little character development here, a very tiny amount, that just leaves me even more upset because...is it just me or did it take until the final sixth of the entire series to find out that Kumar gets panic attacks?

It's really no surprise that I was most interested in the ‘new' characters like Gabe, Kate and Azure because they were each set up well in the previous book and they haven't been totally dragged down by the cardboard cutouts that everyone else is to indicate that they have as little personality and character as everyone else.

This book isn't military sci-fi, even though the characters are in the military. Nor does it have a wide enough scope to be space opera. (Though it does try and open up the world by bringing in more POV's and, for me, it was a very poor choice because those sections really added little to nothing to the story.)

Instead of either, we unfortunately spend the bulk of this story on one planet (that I was looking forward to leaving ever since they arrived there) making first human contact with a new to humans race. (A race that's basically brainwashed eugenicists.)

I found this book to be a depressing slog to get through and I was just unbelievably disappointed.

Also it is furthering the trend that I find in sci-fi of being crazy depressing and people just generally being out for themselves and damn everyone else.