The Not a Book Club Club discussion

Section 5

Discussion should be focused on Chapters 118-End, but discussion of the full book/series is fine.

No spoiler tags required. Though it would be highly appreciated if you Uncheck Add to my Update Feed to avoid accidentally spoiling this for your good read friends.

Not a huge fan of the Avatar but it's pretty damn awesome that the Chinese government's own technology is being turned against them. The same blocks they've put on their citizens is now being used against them, pretty sweet revenge

I found this last section pretty hard to put down. I had been sort of dragging my way through bits of the middle.

Apart from Kade, it's a pretty happy ending. That surprised me a bit. Obviously there are still a lot of unresolved issues, but there is reason to hope things might improve.

In some ways the terrorists in PLF "won". Their forcing Nexus on Congress and the President has at least escalated the time table on acceptance of the technology it seems.

And I wonder what the censors of China will make of this book..

Kade :(

Was not expecting that at all. At least he got to go out s hero though. When he and Shu were talking at the end, I thought maybe he would be able to store his consciousness similar to her but I guess not

Glad that Rangan got his happy ending. That dude went through a lot

Agreed about the PLF, I remember thinking along the same lines that they got what they wanted eventually. I also kept thinking that "Kate" was going to be someone we knew as someone else.

I thought it had a pretty satisfactory ending, I was pleased. Great series

I was hoping the same thing. That he'd somehow become digital.

Would have been kick ass. Wonder if the author will ever revisit this world, a little further in the future

Well, I'm still hoping he does. If nothing else, I want to know about the side effects of long term Nexus use, dammit!

Haha! One set further in the future might be perfect to dissect that

I'd definitely be there to buy another installment.

One thing I forgot to mention was Nexus 6; I guess Kade never shared his plans for that? I can't remember if he ever let the Indians in on it or tried to get them to Rangan. I'm sure someone's already working on it

Rangan seemed aware of his plans for it. I'm not sure if he shared the code with him though. It sounds like he might have shared it with the Indian government though, because Rangan made the comment about how he didn't trust governments to be the ones to do it, and that it had to be out in the open among the various Nexus developers of the world.

I was drawing a parallel in my head between Holden from the Expanse and Kade from these books. There's a lot of parallels between the Expanse and these books anyway, with small groups of "good guys" plonked in the middle of politics and conflict in a relatively near future society.

The parallels were more clear in the first two books, because you have Kade and Holden with paladin-like levels of behavior and apparent naivete. In fact, in these deeply political settings, that's the main flaw these characters have.

But in the third book Kade's behavior is better explained. His actions are clarified not as essentially "good" but as following the best strategy in the prisoner's dilemma game theory experiment. He's called a politician and eventually a soldier, both of which he is in a very real way.

The last part made the book for me - I was really glad it turned around since I liked the first two books so much. The multiple POVs were my biggest issue - I just didn't care enough about most of those characters to want to keep reading. My other issue was maybe the big, evil, almost omnipotent 'machine'. But I guess there needed to be something manipulating events so that our heroes had some big obstacle to overcome.

I liked that Kade was willing to sacrifice himself, although I didn't see that coming. He grew as a character and was a lot less selfish and naïve as the story progressed.

Anyway, great series - and even though I didn't LOVE the last book, I'm sure glad I discovered the trilogy! (Thanks to this group)

I think the depth and breadth of the ideas and actors made this the best book of the series. I really enjoyed the series. I loved the accuracy (or at least plausible future accuracy) of the technical and political details in the series. I like this genre but frequently get distracted by fairly well proven scientifically impossible occurrences.
I was so happy to find a series without these............and then... ......in this final part... of the final book.... there was the elevator fall...... with its creation of an impossible vacuum strength...
.....a brilliant author with tons of knowledge clearly shown in his writing about electronics, politics, education, programming, networking, and cryptography unfortunately was lacking in his knowledge of pneumatics and the physics of gasses.
I am getting over it though.....and with this one small exception....I loved the series.

I agree that the realism of the science was refreshing.

It's been awhile though and I don't remember the elevator fall.