Ballantyne concludes his trilogy without pulling out of the problem that dogged it from the beginning: the real conflict in the story is between forces far larger than human, and all the people in the story are pretty much shepherded through that conflict as spectators rather than actors making meaningful decisions. The last book manages to throw in a bunch of new ideas for dealing with the threats introduced in previous books without explaining how they solve the problem, or using them to solve the problem. (e.g.: The Schrödinger Kittens are cool, but nothing ever explains how they do what they do and they don’t wind up actually providing more than window dressing.)

I wonder if Ballantyne is trying to make some sort of point about oppressive nanny states and free markets, but the presentations in here are such extreme caricatures that they don’t really relate to anything sensible. (One the one hand, you have a powerful AI called the Watcher running a nanny state that enforces altruism on everyone by understanding their motivations so well it can manipulate them, and on the other you have a truly amazing AI called Free Exchange that can somehow figure out how to solve everybody’s problems and set up “fair” exchanges that will solve them— without any explanation of how it works, so they’re just as manipulated.) ( )