Words: Absolution Gap (or, How to Completely Derail a Series)

What a terrible, terrible ending to what started out as a very promising series. I really wanted to like this book, but it became an utter slog fairly early on, and I had to force myself over the finish line (more out of stubborness than anything; this is very rare that I feel this way but I hate to abandon books that I've started). If I hadn't read this on a Kindle, I would have been tempted to throw the book across the room in frustration upon finishing it. I still might.

First, some context about the series as a whole, before I get to my thoughts on this particular book.  Heads up, 'cause it's about to get all SPOILER-y up in here.

I really enjoyed Revelation Space, and thought it was an effective mixture of big ideas, with a galaxy-spanning setting and an intriguing future history built up throughout. The characterization was perhaps the weaker link, but the protagonist was at least an interesting take on the stock "Arrogant Bastard" archetype. It was extremely well-done space opera, and I was excited to read more.

The second book, Redemption Ark, picked up the conflicts established in the first book, along with some of the characters, and all seemed to go well at first. However, in retrospect some of the problems in the series started to show up about halfway through this book, and the majority of it can be blamed squarely on the writing and apparent (lack of) editing. Reynolds, for all of his great ideas, can get extremely long winded, and these books tend to disappear down rabbit-holes of lengthy exposition and really long descriptive passages. Conversations abound, but some anticipated action sequences are either glossed over or happen off-screen. For instance, there's a big build-up towards the theft of an Ultra spaceship, something that seems like it would be really fun to read about after pages and pages of dialogue, whole chapters of dialogue, and then the narrative skips forward to after the event, dismissing it with what amounts to "...and so that happened". Reynolds can spend pages describing the transformed corridors of the Nostalgia for Infinity, but breezes past a freakin' space battle? Feh.

Other problems began to be apparent. There was the ham-fisted, shoehorned in Khouri/Thorn, um, "romance". There was the sudden and not-very-convincing one-eighty in Scorpio's outlook. Why spend so much time on his backstory establishing him as this murderous, revenge-driven badass, just to have him essentially shrug and become one of the good guys? And the biggest sin was to have Volyova, a major character for two books now, die offscreen. Granted, there was not a lot of character depth there, but she had been a major protagonist, and there was a bit of build-up to her sacrifice, but then we get another "...and then this happened".

Still, the overall universe-building and Big Ideas that Reynolds was exploring gave me hope, and so I settled in to Absolution Gap, hoping for the best....

So, where to start with this mess? SPOILERS AHOY as we go down the checklist of woe; I'm not hiding 'em because if you've read this far into a one-star review, then I assume you want it with both barrels.

Among the many, many problems:
- Important characters from the earlier books are killed off fairly early on, and replaced with much less interesting ones. Clavian and Skade both die together about a third of the way in (the actual deaths happen, again, offscreen). Skade, in particular, suffered from an increasingly muddy set of motivations which basically reduced her to a caricature of moustace-twirling villiany. Scorpio essentially becomes a much less compelling Clavian-Lite. Oh, by the way, Thorn, from the last novel, dies in between books, and it happened, you guessed it, off-screen.
- There are a bunch of new characters added here. The third book in a series (not counting Chasm City in this) is a bit late to bring major players on board unless handled expertly, something which Reynolds...does not do.
- Worse, with the new characters and settings given so much emphasis, there are some major plot threads and characters that were much more interesting that are just abandoned and left unresolved. The Mother Nest/Closed Council intrigue and the character of Felka from Redemption Ark come to mind here. The Conjoiner political intrigue was a major part of the first half of the second book, and here that whole plot doesn't even get to fizzle out so much as it's just ignored.
- The story draaaaaaaaaags, on not one but two fronts. The Hela and Ararat plotlines really spin their wheels here for hundreds of pages. There are many, many pointless excursions with minor characters and setting details that pad the page count (a lot) but add nothing to a compelling, forward-moving narrative.
- The antagonists this book introduces, Quaiche and Grelier, die pointless, anticlimactic deaths. Quaiche's in particular was ridiculous.
- Plothole alert: If the Nostalgia for Infinity has been in orbit around Hela for nine years, and has sensors which can detect a mosquito fart from light years away, you're going to tell me they didn't notice Quaiche building his holdfast down there right below them? Presumably that whole endeavor took quite a bit of time and energy.

And then, the ending. Dear gods above, the ending. Where to start? Again SPOILERS AHEAD:
- Okay, I get that the idea that the temptation to bargain with the shadows was a test. If that's the case, Quaiche was going to destroy the scrimshaw suit anyway, choosing to not deal with the shadows, even if the heroes had never come to Hela. Does this then render the ENTIRE COURSE OF ACTION the heroes undertook since leaving Ararat more or less meaningless?
- Reynolds pulls one of the most blatant deus ex machina endings I've ever seen with the 11th hour revelation of the Nestbuilders, yet another ancient, all-powerful race, entering the story. Yes, there were some VERY minor hints in retrospect, but it's basically as if they came out of nowhere.
- The deus ex machina gets worse. After a couple thousand pages of series, the entire human-Inhibitor conflict, the ostensible conflict driving the last two books and forming the backdrop of the first, comes to an end....as it's basically GLOSSED OVER, occurring offscreen (sonofabitch!), described after the fact in a freakin' EPILOGUE! "And so this happened..."

My gods, why did I spend so much time reading this? It has been a long, long time since I've been so, so thoroughly annoyed and disappointed with a book, a long time since I've invested so much time in a series which crashed and burned so craptacurlary. is that a word? It is now. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated this book.

So, ratings:
- Revelation Space: 4 stars. Great ideas, matched by a compelling story. Read this, then pretend the rest never happened.
- Redepmtion Ark: 3 stars. The cracks are starting to show.
- Absolution Gap: 1 stars (really, should be zero stars, but the series started out so well), retroactively ruined the series, and causes me to swear to never, ever read anything by this author again.