Terminal World

There’s a scene towards the end of Terminal World that perfectly encapsulates the book: Our heroes on a desperate rescue mission back to the city that betrayed them, in a Zeppelin losing its high tech defenses bit by bit, being strafed and boarded by suicidal pirates in wingsuits. It’s steampunk, pretty cool, and makes no damn sense. Reynolds does his best with Big Ideas, and in this case the Big Idea (some sort of disaster that creates Zones that limit technology, the survivors clustered around some mysterious mega-structure), just isn’t big enough to hold together the rather flat and amoral characters.