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The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Which is to say: a book warning me about the dangers of ignoring global warming should not make me feel so demoralized that I no longer feel motivated to combat it.

Conceptually I should've liked this. Speculative fiction presented and formatted as nonfiction is intriguing when done well, and a series of interviews with survivors in the future talking about how they got to that point with respect to climate change is a promising concept. It got a tad repetitive though when each interviewee was yet another climate scientist from a different part of the world giving some variation of, "it doesn't feel good to say, 'we told you so,' but here we are." For a work set in a world where there has been so much suffering endured by common folk, it's odd that we don't hear from any of them.

A recurring thread of scorn for previous generations (read: our current generation) for "letting this happen" isn't explored sufficiently. Every time it comes up, it's just explained away like: they knew about the science and either didn't believe it or didn't care because they didn't want to. It felt unfair to not mention this isn't a uniformly held belief by people living in the 2020's, to say nothing of the role of disinformation on social media or the influence of billionaires. Also curiously absent are potential solutions; the last chapter interviews two professors who are asked what could have been done to stop climate change at the turn of the century and the only answer was that every nation should have built more nuclear power plants. No discussion about ICE vehicles, the airline or marine shipping industries, animal agriculture, cryptocurrency mining, commercial over-fishing, waste management, deforestation, etc. Just nope, shoulda built more nuke plants and everything would've been alright!

I get that this was meant to be a what-if scenario where we get worse than the expected worst-case outcome, but some of these vignettes bordered on unbelievable. I don't think a handful of Uighur terrorists could destroy the Three Gorges Dam. I don't think a weakened Egypt dealing with a rising Mediterranean that floods its major population centers would be able to project force in an extended war with Ethiopia over control of the Nile dams. I don't think Israel would be defeated by Iran in a four-day war over the Golan Heights reservoirs and not go scorched earth with their nukes. If you want future geopolitical fanfiction, read The Next 100 Years by George Friedman; at least that was entertaining.

Just an overall condescending, defeatist work that does itself no favors in browbeating the reader into feeling shame over something that hasn't happened yet. There's got to be a better way to convey a call to action without being depressing.

It's been three years since I read the first book in this series, but I remember the high notes: group of anarchists in the middle of nowhere Iowa summon a demon and then freak out because they didn't think it was actually gonna work. Chaos ensues and a small handful of them have to skip town as a result.

This picks up barely a few days later, now in a former tourist town in Montana just outside of Glacier National Park. The gang crashes with some other anarchists that are squatting in an abandoned public library (awesome place to lay low in my opinion) before learning about strange disappearances and reappearances in town. They decide to stay and investigate, blood magic hijinks ensue, etc.

I do like the apparently recurring theme in this world of, "magic is absolutely real, but very precise and hard to get right, but everyday people accidentally stumble upon it sometimes, to their own detriment." Between that and viewing these events through the eyes of literal practicing anarchists who live on the edge of society, we get a fun twist on what would otherwise be a forgettable short urban fantasy romp. These aren't relatable protagonists to me because I've never been teargassed in a riot or had to dumpster dive for food or hitchhike or squat in abandoned buildings for shelter, but I like that they're so different from me.

This could work as a standalone, but I'm glad I read the first one for the extra context. And who knows; maybe it won't take me another three years to read the sequel.

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.