Reviewer Praise for COUNT TO INFINITY
Here is a review for COUNT TO INFINITY. the final book in my Eschaton Sequence by our own Deiseach:
Astounding, epic, mind-blowing SF that finally completes the entire arc of the series and tells us the reason behind all the machinations and plots and the galactic/super-galactic/universal drive to bind all thinking entities into one giant mind.
The individual stories of Rainia, Menelaus and Ximen also are developed and come to a completion (I won’t say ‘ending’). I found the resolution of their conflict satisfying. Menelaus himself does change and mature, while remaining in spirit the same person he was – but he becomes wiser, even if he doesn’t understand how it happens.
The sheer vastness of space and time in this last novel of the entire sequence actually works well to simplify things; because events take place over billions of years, it slows down the action and permits you time to digest what you are reading and what is going on. In some of the earlier novels, things got a bit hectic because over the relatively shorter time schemes (centuries and millennia), an awful lot of activity had to go on, and it was easy to get lost on where you were, what was happening, and which new race was now in the ascendant. This last novel strips a lot of that away; now we are dealing with the (literal) galactic minds and the small-scale individual races are like cells in a human body.
I would recommend this. Enough invention and sheer breadth of scale to inspire several novels of its own, and a fine conclusion to the start, where all the things Menelaus swore to accomplish, in his rash and ignorant youth, actually do get accomplished – if not quite as he expected or planned them to happen.
…
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
