In the end, I had a love-hate relationship with this series. The first book was great, introducing a cool concept of human incorporation- it seemed like it wanted to make points about the benefits and dangers of a corporate capitalist world taken to its extreme.

But then the series veered into a bloody war enveloping all of humanity. My main problem with the rest of this series is that it just took 3 books to tell a story that should have been condensed to 1 (i.e. books 2-4 should have been 1 book). The war had an absurd number of twists and turns. In the end, the series ended up being about the ravages of Total War and the political decisions that can logically drive a society to genocidal murder. That's a very different topic from the one that started the series, which is fine I guess but not something that interests me as much.

When Sci Fi is discussing a topic that interests me less from a societal perspective, that can still be OK if the characters are interesting. Here I don't find that either- Sandra O'Toole is all-knowing and totally in control, directing from a different plain of understanding compared to everyone else, even though she was just revived after 300 years in cold storage and had no time to learn about the world. It's not believable. And Hektor Sambianco is a cartoon villain, also not at all interesting. The military is treated with great reverence, which is fine and respectful, but the military leaders on both sides are archetypal and also not that interesting.

All that said, it reads fast and I wanted to know what would happen so I never considered putting it down. The fate of the avatars was more interesting to me; that was a cool concept even if the Artificial Intelligences suffered from the same character problems as the human characters, including their own cartoon villain.

Mainly I'm glad it's over- I won't be reading more by these authors. ( )