Sean McMullen

Overall this would be best classified as a fun book to read. Lots of action and lots of fun characters. The characters remind me quite a bit of characters from Ayn Rand's books, which means they seem to be slightly one dimensional in the behavior, but that does get toned down some later in the book. It loosely qualifies as steampunk. The post-apocalyptic nature of it sets it in a different era than a lot of steampunk. The setting for most of the book is Australia (in later books it seems that North America comes into play) and a lot of the book is about factions of religious zealots or just simply crazy people at war with each other.

I can't legitimately five star it due to the laborious battle scenes and the unexplainable (and unexplained) behavior of one of the main characters. At best I could simply extract that the character was just crazy and neurotic, at worst it comes across as a sloppy character shift for no other reason than to advance the plot.

Nevertheless, I found myself pouring through it at a brisk pace enjoying the larger scifi elements of the story and at the end I am wondering where it's all going to end up (I have the other two books on the shelf to find out).… (mais)