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Average Customer Rating:

There's some silly stuff in here

Customer Rating:

While it's an interesting tale, the final volume is just a bit of a let down. Everything, and I mean everything, gets tidily resolved. There are some silly bits in here too. You have people on the planet looking at shells being fired by space ships. You have the pilot of a space ship able to spot people on the planet. And then there's the scale of the worlds where these things live. You might think a gas giant planet would support more creatures than the earth as it is so much bigger, and the sun would support even more creatures as it is so much bigger than the gas giant planet - but this does not figure in the story at all. And then there's the human chairman who seems able to run the entire Earth federation single handed with only the aid of a deputy. The person in charge of the Earth Defense Force is off commanding a space fleet. Really? Who's running the military while he's away then? You have to suspend your belief in the real world quite a bit with this tale. It's interesting but not a masterpiece.

Best book of the series	Customer Rating:
This book is a brilliant conclusion to a fantastic epic. It took me only two days to gobble down this book, and i enjoyed every second of it. a nice conclusion to the series.

A solid if unspectacular end to the series

Customer Rating:

So, everything is wrapped up nicely in the Spiral Arm. But perhaps a little too nicely. The dialogue is still clunkingly awful in places, with characters spouting terribly earnest, even pompous lines. The action and invention that compensated for this in previous novels is still there, but it feels diminished, the enemies vanquished a little too easily in the end. I guess an inevitable consequence of having so many characters is that there will be those that are interesting (Basil, Syrix, Davlin) and those who feel pointless or only half drawn (Celli, Cain, most of the Ildirans), and a final volume inevitably has to dwell on everyone, diluting my interest somewhat.

A fitting end

Customer Rating:

A fitting end to a series that seemed like a never ending struggle to fill 7 books. The characters where and kept being as flat as a pancake. Most plots totally transparent. Science dorky and old fashioned. The end left too many lose ends, too many easy exits. I got the last book in this series just because i already have the other 6, which, to be honest, i bought on the pretty cover and some reasonably good reviews of the first book. I am going back to reading I.M. Banks and Dan Simmons, and i will never ever buy a book of Anderson again.

Should be zero stars

Customer Rating:

The author's ideas startec out well in the first couple of books, but there are just so many inconsistencies and so little science in these books that they lose any credibility and become fantasy rather than science fiction. Dwarves, elves and orcs in space you might say. Just hwo fast is this stardtrive? The main players travel vast distances in such a short space of time, how do trees get into space, and what drives them? Is earth populated by dimwits with no investigative journalism? The chairman (of earth - what a daft concept) is a Stalin type figure who seems to have no opposition at all, the Klikiss insect has fabulous technology, but you never hear of or get to meet an intelligent one, and worst of all, if such a being as a faero existed (that lived in the heart of a sun), then there is no way any flesh being could come anywhere near it and survive. There was no explanation of why the 4 elementals started fighting , and why on earth did the klikiss build the robots in the first place, with all those drone workers about? The roamer clans have their space facilities destroyed time after time, yet seem to be able to have everything back to normal by thursday lunchtime! Just totally unbelievable and inconsistent.