This is the best the genre has to offer! Diving right into the next book! ( )

The fifth book I've read in 2017 was a doozy. The Hermetic Millennia, a very long timeline space opera, is the second in a series about a series of posthuman species evolved by a shadowy group of men who feel they must design humanity to counter an alien invasion predicted for 8,000 years in our future. A wonderfully picaresque recounting of future history from a series of strange descendants, and full of interesting tech, the series promises to keep me engaged and happy to be reading John C. Wright. Three more to go, eventually. ( )

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes. blogspot.wordpress.com & librarything.com/catalog/BookstoogeLT by Bookstooge's Exalted Permission.

Title: The Hermetic Millennia
Series: Count to the Eschaton Sequence #2
Author: John Wright
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 400
Format: Kindle digital edition

Synopsis:

The smartest man in the world goes to sleep so he can survive until his wife comes back. However, his enemies, the Hermeticists, wake him up every couple of hundred years by running amok.
In the main story, Montrose is taken captive and used as a translator as his captors search for the Judge of the Ages, ie, Montrose. Montrose learns everything he can so he can wreak his awful and terrible vengeance upon these interlopers, only to realize in the very end that as smart as he is, he can still be outsmarted.
Ends on a cliffhanger.

My Thoughts:

I did not enjoy this as much as Count to a Trillion. Part of that was the dreamlike aspect of the sequence of time. It reminded me a lot of Wolfe's The Wizard Knight with it's asperger syndrome main character. It was disconcerting to have chunks of time and events passed over and simply ignored, for no apparent reason.

The overview of humanity over 7000'ish years was really interesting. Each Hermeticist got their chance to create a humanity they thought were best. Each time Montrose was awakened and set forth events to combat their ideas, which led to the downfall of said race and the arising of a new. Finding out that he was being tricked each time to reveal a strand of super-duper-puper math was something else. While Montrose is the main character and you are kind of rooting for him, he's still an arrogant jerk so the schadenfreude was strong in me.

Make no mistake about this though, this was humanistic to its core. As such it reflects the base values of such a system. There were also times where it just felt like the author was indulging himself a little too much in his own fancy.

The cliffhanger ending was not appreciated. That was the main reason I bumped this down 1/2 star. Anyone who had read both the books so far is definitely going to continue the series. To end it like that smacked of one book being artificially broken up. ( )