This is the third part of the Touchstone trilogy, and anyone who, like
me, loved the first two, won’t have any problem enjoying this too. I’ve
classified these as sci-fi (other planets, high-tech everywhere) but I’m
getting less sure, since the technology is delightfully arm-wavy. All
communication is via the ‘interface’, a brain-embedded universal
internet which is incredibly useful at crucial moments. It can
send/receive messages, provide all sorts of background information (aka
instant info-dump) at the drop of a hat, and helpfully records
everything so that the detail can be picked up later. There are ‘drones’
(robot things) which are deployed in a variety of plot-facilitating
ways. Then there’s the literal world-building - when a new building is
required, a bucket of special goop is ‘programmed’ with an architectural
plan and away it goes. It beats scaffolding and uncouth building
workers, anyway. Even the ‘ships’ used for inter-planetary travel are
largely undescribed and unexplained. Then there are ‘psychics’ with all
sorts of powers - elemental, levitation and teleportation, as well as
actual psychic (mind-reading, sort of) abilities - all of which seems
suspiciously fantasy. No quest, no secret heir to the kingdom, and
definitely no magic swords, but there is a heroine with mysterious
unexplained powers. There are monsters and at least one traditional
fantasy beast, too.
Whatever you call it, the setup is much the
same. Cass is still the stranger from Earth with the weird unexplained
abilities which are so useful in unlocking the abandoned planet Muina,
if they don’t get her killed her first. The inter-planetary politics and
resettlement are taking centre stage now, but the psychic military, the
Setari, are still back and forth on missions to fight monsters. And we
finally have a Big Bad - the particularly creepy humanoid monsters who
are both intelligent and organised. And hell-bent on destruction and
mayhem, not to mention capturing Cass. So the race is on to find out
what is going on, and a way to fight back.
The tension ramps up
nicely to the grand confrontation, and much of the book has rather a
heavy background tone. Cass and friends are doing various fluffy things
(going shopping, eating out, socialising) while waiting for the Big Bad
(the Cruzatch) to turn up again and kidnap Cass for various evil
purposes, destroy the known world, kill all the nice friends and
generally carry out their villainous plans. The good guys, meanwhile,
are more or less floundering round trying to guess what awful thing
might be coming up next, with no greater ambition than just - well,
surviving. Their only plan seems to be - let’s blow stuff up and see if
that helps. Or throw Cass at something to see what happens (which has
been going on throughout, really).
This part of the book
stretches the diary format to its absolute limits. It worked well
earlier on, I think, to get the reader right under Cass’s skin, and was a
very effective way of getting across her sense of isolation and
differentness. It really doesn’t work so well for big battle scenes,
because the reader knows immediately that Cass survived, or she wouldn’t
be writing her diary afterwards. So the big confrontation is
effectively told in abbreviated summary form (‘and then I... and then
we...’), which loses a lot of the tension. There is also the problem
that the romance has been settled, and while it's a lot of fun going
through the are-they-no-surely-not phase with friends, it was actually
more fun when they were kept apart and Cass secretly had the hots for
him. Or at least, it was more tense. A large part of the atmosphere in
the first two books revolved around the very strict military protocols
wrapped around everything Cass did and the stiffly correct attitude of
the Setari, which kept her so heart-rendingly alone. Now that she's
sleeping with one of the Setari and is (largely) friends with the rest,
things get a little warm and fuzzy and group-hug-y.
One aspect is
unchanged, however; everything still hinges on Cass and her strange set
of abilities as 'touchstone', the key to revealing the past, what went
wrong to cause the planet Muina to be abandoned, and (indirectly) the
present and future too. It's surprising how often these talents drive
the plot by revealing key information or making some unfeasibly
difficult task possible, but while this is very convenient, it never
feels like deus ex machina, since Cass has had these abilities from the
start and has simply learned to use them (or to use them better,
perhaps). Plus they frequently go wrong or out of control or twist off
in unexpected ways. The author is very good at following the appropriate
logic for these developments, so that when Cass has one of her frequent
brushes with death, she is 'grounded' for a while afterwards, even when
it might have been more dramatic to have her present at some incident
or other, instead of hearing about it second hand. Nice, too, to see
Cass herself using her talents directly to fight her own battles
(sometimes literally), instead of being a passive tool to be
manipulated. The moment when, in the midst of mayhem, she decides to
visualise into reality a battle-winning device of awesome proportions is
simply epic.
This is the final part of the trilogy, and I hugely
enjoyed the first two parts, so it’s not exactly a big surprise that I
loved this one too. Of course, it’s not perfect (what is?). The problem
with keeping track of the vast array of characters is even greater this
time round, and apart from the Big Bad they all seem to be rather nice,
pleasant people. Even the few set up as hostile turn out to be gruff and
suspicious rather than outright nasty, in the end. And who'd have
thought so many of them would be breath-takingly beautiful, intelligent
people? From being entirely alone on a strange planet, Cass ends up
friends with pretty much everyone, which is slightly implausible. The
complexities of a society of umpteen million people are fairly
comprehensively airbrushed away into one homogenous mass (although I
guess the ubiquitous interface would eliminate a lot of differences).
The rather different society on Nuri was interesting, and I would have
liked to know more about it. I also found it strange that so much of
life on Tare and Muina was similar to Earth; there was really no effort
to make these worlds truly alien, apart from a few minor details tossed
in here and there. And anyone looking for explanations for every little
mystery will be disappointed, since much remained unanswered or vague.
In
the end, though, none of that mattered. I loved Cass's shift over the
course of the trilogy from schoolgirl thinking only about romance and
exams, to the saviour of worlds and the focus of inter-planetary
law-making. And she makes the transition without fuss - the occasional
totally justified hissy-fit excepted - and without losing her essential
nature or her sense of humour. Much of what she goes through is pretty
horrible but she bears it with quiet fortitude and oodles of common
sense. One of my favourite fictional characters. Five stars.
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