Random meanderings about the books I love—or don't.
Interspersed with observations about my hobbies: Beer & Wine, Bridge, Bikes and Bow-wows.
A pretty good story, with a couple of glaring holes. The holes may be purely due to its biggest drawback — which is that it is not book one of a trilogy. It's the first third of a thousand page tome. I really hate that. In a series, every book needs to have some conclusion. In this case, I received this volume free, so it's more like a teaser for the rest, but if I'd paid for it, I'd be more than a little miffed finding it end in a cliff-hanger, without even really much of a clue what the apparent conspiracy is about.
The major plot hole is the rebuilding of an incredibly advanced civilization just 59 years after an apocalyptic event. Sure, it looks as if the collapse of civilization may have come 800 years or so from now (some diary entries dated 2814.1 and 2814.2) and so the technology demonstrated is probably less advanced than the tech before the collapse, but you couldn't possibly rebuild our current technology from nothing in 59 years. You need working machinery to build the machinery. It took 300 years to get where we are from the beginning of the steam age. We can be sure that, if we managed to save the know-how, we could do it over in much less time, but you need to show me how that's going to work, instead of assuming it.
Sometimes it reads as if Thomas is trying out words just to demonstrate his vocabulary. Unfortunately, he needs to actually consult a dictionary. There's a difference between wrath and wroth, and between apropos and appropriate.