Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also the author is a personal friend and all-around nifty person.
This is the culmination of the trilogy that started with Updraft. If you’re the sort of person who needs to know that something has a definite-and-for-sure ending before you buy that thing: here you are, here is the ending, it is a really-truly ending that ends. (I really want to encourage people not to do that, because it’s a good way to make sure people don’t get to have their endings published–especially people like Fran who have given you nice volume endings in addition to the larger series ending. But I know that such people exist, so! Here is the information you were looking for: ending!)
I don’t recommend starting with Horizon. This is clearly a culmination, and there are only two books before it to give you the plot and character arcs Fran is weaving together here; it’s not like you have to read twelve bugcrushers to get to what she’s doing here. Kirit and Nat and their friends and relations–and grudging allies, and adversaries–are back and struggling for survival–trying to figure out, from page one, what shape their survival can even take.
For that reason, it’s hard to review Horizon in very concrete terms, because there’s so much that it’s doing that depends on the previous books. It’s exciting from the first page, it’s all engineering and all social and all heart, all at once. Fran’s weaving threads and perspectives together in ways that she didn’t in previous books–rather than resting on previous successes, she’s doing this book in a new way, and it works. It’s the way this book would have to work, but I love to see that in a first series, rather than copying the structure of a first book that’s had as much success as Updraft has, I love to see an author following the story and doing what it needs even if the structure isn’t the same. The previous volumes didn’t pull punches, and neither does Horizon, but it does that in its own way.
The ending is satisfying without being overly tidy, without being one-size-fits-all for characters who have spent this whole trilogy coming in different sizes. And…I really appreciate the way people with common goals don’t always trust each other, don’t always like each other–and are sometimes very grumpy at the compromises they have to make with each other. The world is like that; the world of fiction too often finds it difficult to be both satisfying and realistic, but I think Horizon manages both. With lots of astonishing creatures and feats of derring-do in between.
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