The Fall of Koli The Rampart Trilogy, Book 3

I read the last two books of this trilogy pretty much back to back. I read the first book some time ago, and at that time, I didn't feel like pursuing the series. But I'm reasonably glad I came back to it. I know some folks these days make a fuss about how may trans/gay/bi/non-neurotypical etc characters there are in fiction, especially SFF. I honestly can't say it bothers me. I grew up as a pretty sheltered cishet female, so it's good for me to see different viewpoints and ways of being. In this series, England is a few hundred years past a devastating war. Human settlements are small and scattered. The remaining humans in these small settlements are starting to suffer the effects of too small a gene pool. Fertility is dropping, and the often the babies that ARE born don't survive. There are remnants of old tech that people still rely on. The usage of that tech and the manipulation of who gets to use it plays a big part in the first book. I'll pass on that, because it was the least interesting part for me. The last two books see our heroes Koli, Cup, and Ursala-from-Elsewhere seeking the source of a beacon from some old tech place. Ursala hopes to find more old tech that will enable her to upgrade the old medical tech she's been carrying around and using to help folks who are sick or injured. She also thinks with an upgrade to the tech, she could help straighten out some of the genetic problems that would otherwise doom the human race to extinction. When they find the source of the beacon, they also find an old evil lurking. But there are also other resources, if they can defeat the old evil and escape. Because my brain is the way it is, I kept wondering how tech 300+ years old would still be functioning. And I also wondered how making roads would ultimately keep the deadly forests at bay, since presumably there were roads before the war, and they were generally swallowed up by the trees. But I also thought of The Postman, where the simple act of carrying messages and letting people communicate with each other went a long way toward making a post-apocalyptic world a better place. Since so much of the tech in this world is essentially magical, I kinda stopped worrying after a while. The big think I didn't really care for was the way the characters (mostly Koli, tbh) mangled words they didn't understand. "Diagnostic" became "dagnostic." Stuff like that. It brought me up short almost every time. I KNOW why it's there. I just didn't like it. M.R. Carey tells good stories, though. I liked this one. Solid 3.5 stars for the series as a whole.

This is about as close to perfect you can close out a trilogy. Satisfying ending without feeling like a cop out. Amazing pacing and story. Depth of characters was A+. Hugo nod for best series, no question