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So you're telling me not only did we stick the landing, but I also enjoyed this one even more than the preceding two books? And the main plot was resolved satisfactorily while also leaving a new, obvious and unrelated plotline ready to be picked up in the future? And I'm now caught up and have to wait for the next books to be written to find out what happens next? Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I'm surprised that something I invested so much time into has actually felt rewarding.

This wasn't a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants conclusion to the trilogy, but there was sufficient forward momentum to keep me engaged without feeling rushed. And similar to Resolute there are kind of twin plotlines occurring simultaneously with civilian diplomats putting their best foot forward negotiating with sentient aliens for the first time in human history while the military is trying to quietly clean house and tamper down a mutiny behind the scenes.

This series was a refreshing take on military sci-fi in that it wasn't dripping with machismo and up-close violence, didn't glorify the ugly bits of war, and didn't other the enemy as something that was morally correct to destroy. While there are chest-thumping marines and other elite special force characters, they're not the focus and are instead viewed through the eyes of a (space) naval admiral who understands his first priority is to protect the civilian ideals he'd sworn to uphold, something that gets routinely put to the test. A lot more emphasis on the ethics of how top military brass should behave than I expected going into it, but that's not a bad thing.

I'm sad to be leaving this universe and Admiral Geary, but at least I still have a big back catalog from this author to work through.

Sometimes I hear people complain about "second book syndrome" for trilogies specifically, where it feels like an author is just padding a wordcount to turn out a book before resolving the larger story they actually want to tell in the third entry. At least in my eyes, that definitely wasn't the case here.

We're still working towards making progress on the bigger, overall mission these characters are setting out to accomplish, but damned if there aren't complications out the wazoo. Imagine you're trying to hash out a deal with a client over the phone who just barely speaks your language, but you keep having to put them on hold because your coworkers are actively trying to kill you. That's basically what Admiral Geary is going through in this installment.

And as if trying to suss out who is and who isn't going to stage a mutiny against you wasn't enough, they also make first contact again with a different alien race that the first bunch of aliens react to with a collective sigh, as if to say, "Oh great, they're here..." What initially feels like a diversion just for its own sake eventually becomes relevant and pushes to main narrative along in an interesting way, culminating in another (but unique) capital ship space battle). Our protagonist is continuously coming out of increasingly difficult challenges on top though, and I wonder if that luck will eventually run out.

Consider me invested; too late to not see series this through now.

While, yes, this is the first book in a trilogy, I did not realize that said book is also the nineteenth book in a larger overall series. But you know what? I ended up having a blast anyway, additional context be damned.

We drop into the story about one hour after the climax of the preceding book, which had me reeling on the back-foot for a bit, but once I was able to piece together the larger events from context clues I was good. Our protagonist was a (space) naval officer who had to enter a cryosleep situation after his ship was destroyed, except no one found him for 100 years and when he woke up the same war was still being fought. I was expecting more heavy-handed messianic treatment around such an obvious Jesus figure, but no, he's just a guy trying his best and is 100% reluctant to be thrust into the limelight. If anything he's more confused by the society and home that changed so much without him while he was gone.

After two assassination attempts and some high-stakes senatorial jockeying, the plot slows down a bit in the middle, but not for long, and it makes sense narratively why it happens; it's sort of the deep breath before taking the plunge into everything that comes after. The rest is exactly what I came here for: huge set-piece battles between massive capital ships in three dimensions, relativistic speeds becoming plot devices, space marines making drops from orbit onto a besieged planet, and a lot of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" dealmaking while both sides have guns pointed at each others' heads. And we haven't even gotten to the aliens yet!

My attempt to treat this year as my "Year of Series" hasn't been going so well, but I did immediately pick up and start reading the sequel to this one upon finishing it, so that's something.

Title feels like a bit of a misnomer; while the beginning and end focus on cosmology from the Big Bang to the Heat Death of the Universe (what I thought the entirety of this book would be about), the middle 50% or so focuses on earth specifically. Maybe, "The Shortest History of Our Universe: Earth Edition!" didn't test as well with marketing groups.

The math and the dimensions of the early universe are always crazy to wrap my head around. What do you mean the universe was the size of a grapefruit 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, and then grew to 10 light years wide within the first 10 seconds?! I love this stuff. The explanations of how stars and galaxies form are great as well.

We also get a good walk-through of the formation of our solar system and all the epochs that earth specifically went through to get to its current configuration, but I couldn't help but feel that the entirety of human history was given too much attention (a sentence I never thought I'd type). I get not wanting to leave stuff out, but I wasn't expecting this much of an anthropological and historical detour in the middle of what I thought was going to be a physics and astronomy book. Also an odd fixation on repeatedly mentioning how indigenous people in the Americas and Australia were wiped out by Afro-Eurasian diseases during waves of colonization, as if that was a defining moment of the entirety of the human existence.

But it brought me back in again with speculating on what the literal end of the universe might look like. Does it eventually burn itself out and everything goes dark and quiet? Will expansion eventually slow, reverse, and result in a Big Crunch? Will some hyper-advanced society figure out how to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics to keep the lights on? Who knows, but it's fun to think about.

I won't go so far as to say Hammett's redeemed himself in my eyes, but I enjoyed this more than I hated The Maltese Falcon. But I'm also just one guy and he died 64 years ago, so I doubt he's pressed about my opinion.

This had one of the more unique setups in noir fiction that I've read; Nick Charles is a (former) detective who keeps reminding everyone of that crucial fact, but no one seems to listen to him and instead he's approached by multiple characters who believe he's the only one who can help them. He's on vacation in NYC with his wife Nora (who didn't actually feature in the book as much as the marketing blurb led me to expect), and gets roped into the problems of a family he used to be friends with. Also everyone in said family is psychotic.

The poor guy can't catch a break and just relax on his trip, and because everyone in town thinks he's working the murder mystery case that he wants nothing to do with, Nick ends up attracting the wrong kind of attention until he has to solve it for his own safety. Obviously it's very of its time with the treatment/portrayal of women, everyone's an indoor chain-smoking alcoholic, and random racial epithets are casually dropped without thought. It comes with the territory of the genre and I'm used to it by now.

What got me was how complicated the final reveal and explanation was; I had to read a summary after the fact because in the source text I had a hard time following who was responsible for what. Still, expectations were met, and I especially enjoyed the aesthetic and vibes of this story, specifically a prolonged scene in a rowdy and dangerous speakeasy. A perfectly acceptable middle-of-the-road example of the genre. Sure, you could do better, but you could do a hell of a lot worse too.