Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

So I was 4 books and 2 novella's into this and saw she was supposed to wrap up the damn thing so, much like being that far into Niven's 'known space' series I really felt I had to read Fiddlehead and be done with it.

The writing was a bit stronger then the last few installments. And she had a definite goal of wrapping up the extraordinarily long civil war, which meant she was forced to move along the action... I say forced because you can sense it in the writing, even though it wasn't delivered. I have to say, while she wrote better, the prose was some of the strongest yet, the content was utterly lacking and I found the climax of 4 and 2 portions novels to be very underwhelming. I will put this into spoilers... not I think people care all that much...

(view spoiler)[So, 1) The war itself, I think she just outright fucked up. Neither side would ever have fought it out for 20 years.. technology be damned. I know that's why this is fantasy and so be it, but with the casualties mounted like they had plus Zombies, there is no way either side had the men to fight for 20 years. I never really got that Priest understood what 20 years of high level violence would do.... I think the end result would be a real wasteland, a near dark age, certainly not the heights of technology that are shown by book 5 and 2/3's.

2) that being said, Ending the war? 20 years and, as it says in different ways, the north and south are practically fighting out of habbit. Fine, I don't believe it, but that's what we have. So, to end the 20 year Civil War, in Fiddlehead, requires a) an essay written by an unknown minority scientist, b) a gun fight at the Lincoln estate and c) a lurking southern belle to talk some union soldiers into driving a tank into a cave instead of to Atlanta. I find it preposterous. I found the gunfight to be EXTREMELY LONG, DRAWN OUT and DIDN'T ADD ONE SINGLE THING to this book or the series. It was just filler. It didn't prove anything. It wasn't grand, no one cared, no one in DC apparently gave a fuck enough to come check in on the Lincoln household during. Eh?

3) The Zombies. Seattle. The Gas that might envelop the world? No, no real ending. I grant that she didn't actually say the series was done, but I think I'm done. Nothing is added in regards to them. Nothing is brought to a head. (hide spoiler)]

And as we stand here at Book 5 and it's over I guess my problem, and I didn't really see it until now, is that I didn't care about the fictionalized civil war. It was background, it was a setting. What I started with was Boneshaker and it delivered up Zombies and Steampunk, and it was good. And then it just goes off those brass rails and into some weird speculative universe for two novels and two novella's, and in the 'Inexplicables' you THINK they're going back to zombies and clockwork but really it's just (view spoiler)[Bigfoot and Drug dealers.... (hide spoiler)] and it ultimately has nothing to do with anything. Now back in Fiddlehead it's just full bore Speculative Civil War and now the Zombies are the background and the Steampunk is something that happens at the very very beginning of the book and is only referred to thereafter.

So I have an unbelievable setting that was fine when it was background and can't stand up as the main event and we were delivered from this event on incredibly small scale. Sad that it was actually some of her best writing, 4 stars for sure, but I'm taking one off for filler content and pointlessness, and another because the whole damn series has gone pointless.

Like I said in my review of "MapleCroft" Priest writes the kinds of things I like to read, she's in my wheelhouse... but then when you see it executed on paper line by line it's really not my jam at all.