Wow. This was an amazing conclusion to the Convergence Saga. I’ve said this before about this series, but what I love about the Convergence Saga is that the main characters are anarchists. There is an ancient battle being waged in the shadows between secret societies with rigid hierarchies and chains of command, but the characters we follow are navigating their own path. This book is largely about cooperative networks, intentional communities, and the monsters and humans trying to live together, not divided. Different characters have different approaches, like violence in self defense or writing legal protections into law, but they still work together to answer a fascinating question: what does true sovereignty look like?

I am stunned by how important and fleshed out every character from No Gods, No Monsters, as well as The Lesson, is in this book. I only just finished We Are The Crisis a few weeks ago, and I still realized when I opened this book that I had missed all the main characters. Characters who seemed to have one off appearances actually play pivotal roles in the story. All have such emotional depth, and I feel so much for them. I love my pack of friendly neighborhood anarchist werewolves. I love Dragon, and his guardian figures. I love the woo woo family, including Sonya. I was completely blindsided by the role that Mera played in the book. And I of course loved Cal and the people looking out for him.

I will say that I have read all of Cadwell Turnbull’s books in a relatively short time (around the last 6 months), and I still was having a hard time remembering characters by name. It is a really big cast. I did notice that this book in particular went out of its way to summarize the events of the earlier books in the series and The Lesson, which was helpful but still a bit later in the book. I would recommend reading the Convergence Saga back to back, and I would say it is important to read The Lesson before reading A Ruin, Great and Free.

In this book, we finally get answers to the mysteries and eldritch horrors of the series. The scale of this cosmos is stunning, and plenty is left outside of the realm of human comprehension. But I was able to finally understand the machinations at play, and get a satisfying ending for the characters. It makes me want to go back and immediately reread the whole series, now that I actually know what’s going on. In particular, this book is when we finally get to hear from the gods. Some characters are humans, some are monsters, and some are gods, but for some characters these categories are not mutually exclusive. Mortals become gods, and gods are reborn as humans, and humans become monsters without giving up their humanity.

I love this series, and I’m so glad that I read it. I’ll be reading Cadwell Turnbull’s upcoming short story collection All The Hidden Places soon.

The ending to this book was so thought-provoking. I feel like this has a lot of the appeal of classic sci-fi, because it explores an idea about language and culture and then takes it to the extreme. To me, the ending left me with so much to think about around ideas like authenticity, extractivism, and I saw a lot of real world parallels. I liked that there were no easy answers, even though the ending was very bleak.

Although the ending stuck with me, I felt just alright about the book overall. The ideas were interesting, but as an actual narrative, I never got too invested in the characters or the world. There was a lot of worldbuilding that the author threw into the book casually just to give an impression of the larger galaxy, but it didn’t feel relevant to the plot to reference a random detail about the grammar of a random species that doesn’t come up again. I also feel like in real life, linguists will specialize on a specific language or a specific feature they study across languages, unlike the linguists in this book who would casually move between dozens of languages and blend grammars and syntax for fun. It felt a little over the top. But I did appreciate that the main character especially is motivated by a true passion for linguistics, and finds himself caught up in a much larger power struggle.

I did like that the main character is not a human, and we learn a bit about his species and their culture in little glimpses and pieces as he lives his life. I also thought that the big ethical dilemma was very tough, and there are not any easy answers. I think there is a pressing issue in linguistic anthropology about how we treat the languages and cultural practices of groups that are subject to genocide for their land and resources, and I think this book offered a great thought experiment that’s also set in space.