The Rampart trilogy ends on a satisfying note. My decades-old status as Mike Carey Fanboy Extraordinaire continues.
I've wondered more-or-less since this trilogy got going what the context was of Koli's looking-back narration of events, and what kind of conclusion Carey might have that would be satisfying. Happy to say that as far as I'm concerned he pulled that part off nicely.
Since book 2 and the emergence of Spinner as co-protagonist I've also been wondering quite a lot about how the two story lines would converge for the climax of the book. Happy to report that also worked well, and developed naturally. Nothing felt forced about it.
I also like - though perhaps "like" isn't the correct word - how Carey managed to work some good old fashioned 21st Century-style bigotry into this. Koli and Ursula are both dark skinned, and Cup is trans. No one cares at all about the skin color, and most people don't care about the trans. While I've got no problem whatsoever with spec fic authors choosing to create a post-racial (or other flavors of hate) world, in a series so thoroughly rooted in our present problems it felt a bit forced. He was able to bring enough of the (for this world) archaic bigotry in that it felt appropriate, without taking over the narrative.
The real strength of this book, though, as far as I'm concerned, is Monono Aware. She doesn't rise to the level of co-protagonist, as there's only a handful of chapters from her perspective. She’s been the most interesting aspect of the series from the beginning, and in this book we get to see just what she’s been thinking from the moment she woke up and gained sentience. It’s something that I have to admit I never considered: now that she’s more than just a kawaii iPod user interface what does she want? Is she content to just spend her life in Koli’s pocket?
The answer is no, and it is handled wonderfully.
There are three things that annoyed me, but not enough to bring this down to 4 stars. One is how perfectly the preserved technology works. Doesn’t matter how much battering and bashing it takes, it just sits in the sun for a while, engages its repair protocols, and et voilà! Good as new. As a Star Trek fan, this probably shouldn’t annoy me, but it does. The second is how little, in the end, the hyperaggressive natural world actually mattered in this trilogy. It’s an omnipresent danger, but it’s not one that ever really does anything, plot-wise. This complaint is probably rooted (pun 100% intended) in my tagging this series early on as “the Broken Earth, but with botany instead of geology.” The third thing that annoyed me is the post-book epilogue. It felt a little too tidy.
But those are my only complaints. This is a wonderful trilogy.
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