Well, my conclusion after reading this book, the last in the trilogy, is that I won't be reading any more of Sean McMullen's work. There's something rather juvenile in the characterizations, as if these people were what a 15-year old boy imagined adults to be like.

There's a lot of interesting plot elements, but they get to be just too much, and a late-in-the-book revelation that could have been exciting and shocking falls rather flat, because there is no setup for it whatsoever.

At this point, I feel like I need to read something a little more sophisticated to whip my brain back into shape.

The Miocene Arrow is an improvement over Souls in the Great Machine, but the characters are still more like pawns for the author than real people, although there's a lot less sudden madness and changes of motivation.

The plot is more controlled as well. There's no last-minute introductions of major plot elements, and it all hangs together reasonably well.

Still, I was starting to get tired of this author towards the end of the book. Stay tuned for book three.

Souls in the Great Machine should be thought of an "over-stuffed" book, like an over-stuffed burrito or something. It's got so many plot threads and characters you really need to be taking notes to keep it all straight, and it dives right in without a lot of introduction.

This is both its strength and its weakness. There's a lot of interesting things to read, and the density and variety make it pretty compelling. But it seems like McMullen wasn't really able to keep good control over all the bits and pieces, and some plot threads appear almost out of nowhere, late in the book, without any setup. It actually turns out they're setup for a sequel, but they're still jarring.

Also jarring is what seems like rather abrupt personality shifts in some of the main characters. Some characters are reasonably well-developed and feel very real, while some feel like they're just taking a certain course of action because the author needed them too.

Having read the sequel (more on that later), I can say he gets better at dealing with this, but there are parts in Souls of the Great Machine where I just though "why would she do that?"

It's worth a read, just for the sheer invention of the whole thing, and judging by the sequel, he seems to have improved his technical handling of this style of writing. There's a third book in the series that I'll be reading soon, and I'm hoping that he continues improving as a writer in that one.