 Okay, so I finished the last book in the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, which is On the Ocean of Eternity, and, uh, well, I hate to say this, but it dropped to the ball. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So before I get into the review, I just want to make a quick announcement here. Next month, April of 2019, will be a Song of Ice and Fire month on my channel. Like, a lot of people have been asking for a very long time. I actually enjoy a Song of Ice and Fire. Why don't I talk about it more? And, like, well, yeah, I enjoy it. I just haven't really seen an opportunity to talk about it until now, so I will have several videos about that coming out next month. But I'll also have several regular ones that were already scheduled or that I already promised coming out, so look forward to all that. And, uh, now we can get into the actual review here. On the Ocean of Eternity starts off basically where the last book left off. The Nantucketters have gathered up their allies, and so they're attacking Tartesos in the west so that they can move on to Greece where Walker and his gang have based themselves. And meanwhile, in the east, Walker is attacking the Hittites and the Babylonians, excuse me, almost set of Syrians. Ancient history nerds would have been mad at me. But they're attacking them in the east, and them and their Nantucket allies are, you know, holding the line, but they haven't won yet. No one has won in that side yet. And like I said, this one does not end the war in a very satisfying way. Before I get into all the stuff that really annoyed me, though, I want to talk about the stuff that I liked, that I thought this book did well. First things first, all the battles are really, really cool still. You know, some people might think that there are too many of them and that they get a little confusing, and yeah, I can see that because in this book the timeline jumps around a little bit. It did it in the last one too, but in this one it's a little more noticeable. So I guess that could be a problem for some people, but for me, I still really like it. I still love seeing all the tactics and also the strategy because a lot of books like this, even if the authors have a solid grasp of tactical doctrine, they don't really have a grasp of strategic doctrine, and so seeing this one, which has a pretty good idea of both, is really, really neat to me. And surprisingly, some of the villains actually get a lot more development and depth in this one. Now, I'm not talking about Walker because he's still just a power-hungry asshole, there's really not much to him, although in this one he actually gets a little bit worse because for the longest time he seems like a sociopath, whereas in this one he seems a little bit more like a sadist, like he's enjoying hurting people rather than just not caring. And same with Hong, his girlfriend, I guess, Alice Hong, I don't know what their relationship could really be described as, but yeah, she just went straight fuckin' crazy in this one. Actually, even in the last one she did go straight fuckin' crazy, but in this one, yeah, they focus on it more and it's just, it's just, no, no, they're still bad villains. However, some of Walker's allies are actually given more depth and more screen time to become more interesting. Like Iskettarol is the first one, he's the king of Tartesos in this, and he only became king because of all the knowledge and everything that he gained from Walker, but in this one, even though before he seemed like just a power-hungry asshole like him, in this one we see that, yeah, he does actually feel a responsibility towards his people, he wants to improve their lives, and we also know that in the original timeline Tartesos is barely even remembered, like it's gone. We don't even really know where it was, so he wants to avoid that fate, he wants them to actually last longer and have them in their culture live on, and I can sympathize with that. Like he's still a giant asshole and he's still a bad guy and I don't, I was never on his side, but I can sympathize with his position there and there is some depth to it, so I like that. And the other villain that actually gets some depth is George McAndrews, who was one of the renegade soldiers that came with Walker when he first left. And I haven't mentioned Andrew, McAndrews here because, well, he's just such a minor character, but even from the beginning he did have at least a somewhat sympathetic stance. He had an actual reason for doing what he was doing, and the thing is, McAndrews is black and his idea is to go to Africa and give black people all the same, you know, weapons and technology and knowledge that everyone else is getting at this time so that they can avoid being colonized and avoid being enslaved and all the nasty things that happened in our timeline. And yeah, I get that. I understood what he was going for from the beginning. I just didn't think that he, how should I put this? I didn't think that he was going about it the right way, and he was just such a nothing character. Like, I don't even think he got a line of dialogue in the second book, but he was just such a nothing character that I didn't feel he was worth mentioning. But in this one, he's still a minor character, don't get me wrong, but we get an entire chapter that follows his perspective. So we see into his head, and what he's doing is he's going into the Sudan area south of Egypt, and he is starting to build up his own little kingdom there. He's starting to give the people that live there who are black, he's starting to give them weapons and everything, and you know, I'll give him this. Like, even if I don't totally agree with him, and I don't think he's a good person, and I don't think he's necessarily going about things the right way, I will grant him that he's a lot smarter than I gave him credit for at the beginning. And in fact, he's smarter than most of the characters gave him credit for at the beginning. The only thing is that his character arc doesn't really get a conclusion in this book, so that was very disappointing to me. Other than that though, this book does not do a whole lot very well. For starters, there was a hell of a lot of padding and wasted time in this one. Now there was some in the last one, but it wasn't really that big a deal. There was only a few points. Whereas this one, I'd say a good 30% of the book didn't need to be there. Now, on a micro level, we just have scenes that go on for too long. You know, like, there'll be points where, okay, the scene should be over here, we get the purpose of it, we get everything that's gone on, but it goes on for like another page and a half, and that happens multiple times in here. And that's not like the end of the world, but it's kind of annoying and it does contribute to the bigger problems, which include things like Jared Coughlin, who is the executive officer of the Republic of Nantucket, remember. He's in charge of this and he just sort of hangs around. Like there's a lot of scenes with him in Nantucket and just him hearing about how the war is going and everything, but he just sort of hangs around. He doesn't really do anything interesting. There is some talk about how they're having trouble funding the war effort, but that doesn't really go anywhere. I think what they wanted to do here was just to remind us that Jared was actually the closest thing to a protagonist that this book, that this series had in like the first half of the first book, and since then he hasn't really been that prominent, but I don't know. It's just kind of weird seeing him just exist and not really do anything interesting. And then there's the matter of the expedition that went to the interior of North America in the last book. Now, I specifically mentioned this because it didn't really felt like it went anywhere in that book, but in this one it goes somewhere but it goes somewhere really boring that I don't care about. See, what happens is they go all the way to California and they discover a Tartesian outpost there. They're setting up like a little colony, you know, enslaving the natives, all that stuff. And a pretty substantial portion of the book is devoted to them trying to rally the natives together and destroy the base. And well, I just didn't care throughout all of it. It was not that well done, I just thought it was boring and stupid and I didn't like it. But hey, even if you did like it, which I won't begrudge you for if you liked that sequence, but if you did like it, just remember that it didn't really affect the rest of the story at all. Like think about it, the greater war effort, if they had lost and the Tartesians had kept that base there, it wouldn't have mattered much because it's hardly even mentioned outside of that. It's not a major supply depot or anything, it's just a base that the Tartesians put there to basically thumb their noses at Nantucket. And then when we get to the end of the book, it's, well, it's pretty anticlimactic. I'll talk about that in the spoiler section, but it just, it doesn't have much to it really. It just sort of ends and then, well, that's it. It doesn't have a fun, cool battle scene. It doesn't have a really complex political maneuver that allows them to finally achieve victory. It just sort of something happens and then it's over. And, well, that's just, that's not a fun way to do it. Now the copy of the book that I read also had a lot of grammatical errors in it. And maybe they fixed it in later editions, but the fact that they're there, and there's a lot of them, it's not just one or two that I noticed. There's a lot of grammatical errors and a lot of typos here. That shows me that there was not a proper editing process to this book. And so now after seeing that, I'm realizing like, okay, that's why this one has so much filler in there. And this, again, this book is longer than the other two, like noticeably longer. And so after reading both the last one and this one, I'm thinking this series should have just been two books. Because, think about it, the last one, it wasn't too bad in terms of padding, but it didn't really have its own story. You know, it didn't have its own conflict with the beginning, middle, and end. It just sort of stopped, and then it led into this one. But then that leads to the problem of this one also not really having a beginning. It just sort of starts. And so I'm thinking that if they just cut out a lot of the bullshit, then they probably could have just made both of those into one book. And granted, it would still have to be pretty long if they were going to do this story any sort of justice, but well, yeah, that's sort of the sacrifice you make. And if they didn't want to do that, then they probably could have put in a whole lot more talk of like trade and the relations between Nantucket and other areas, or something. You know, just give me something, because there was not a lot here. So that's the end of the non-spoiler section. If you read the first two books, then I guess you should probably read this one, just to finish up the story, just to see how things wrap up and how things end. Unless you read the second one and you just didn't give a shit anymore for whatever reason, you just were bored, you didn't care, then this one's probably not going to change your mind. And well, again, this last book really does drop the ball at the end of the series. So if you haven't read the series at all, I would be hesitant to tell you about picking it up. So I don't know, I guess you could call this a mixed review, but I mean, it's not a terrible book. It was okay, I'd say, but I just don't know how I could really recommend it to all that many people. So now comes the spoiler section. If you don't want to get spoiled, don't watch anymore. Okay, here we go. So at the end of the book, Walker actually gets poisoned by one of his own people. He gets betrayed. Like, he doesn't get killed in battle. Shut up, phone. My phone always goes off while I'm recording these. Goddamn. And anyways, Walker just gets poisoned by one of his own men. And it's not totally out of nowhere is the thing. They do hint at it, and we do understand that he's made a lot of enemies among his own people and in his own empire. But, like, well, it just sort of happens really quickly and then it's over. And, like, that's the end of the war, too. And so, like, that's just not a good climax. It's frustrating to read because it happens, like, I don't know, 20 pages before the book ends. And, ah, man, I don't even really know how to quite describe just how much of a letdown that is. That is just a huge, huge blunder. And that also goes back to me saying that this book doesn't feel like it had much of an editing process. That one, that feels like an ending from a first draft. Like, I feel like if you went back and changed a couple things around, you could maybe make that ending more satisfying or you could maybe just change it and do something different altogether. I don't know, but that is a huge, huge mark against this book. And other than that, there's really just no talk of the aftermath of this war at the end of the book. Like, there's barely a resolution to this. Like, there's barely a climax and there's barely a resolution. Which, again, all the stuff that has really fascinated me throughout this was the relations with the other people and the trade and the way that the Nantucketers changed the world around them. And if they had had some more talk about that in the aftermath, like, they talk about, okay, we have some people allying with this place and we're not really allying with this place, really. And they talk about that a little bit, sure, but I wish they just had more of it. And if they just had an epilogue, which only lasted, I don't know, 10, 15 pages, which took place like 10 years later and we could see how, okay, things are changing and we can see, okay, for the bad, for the good, how is the political situation on the Nantucket, all that sort of stuff. That would be great. Like, that would make us realize that, okay, all this fighting was for a reason. It wasn't for nothing. And granted, military sci-fi in general is not great about having resolutions like that and showing exactly what the aftermath of the fighting is. It's more about the fighting itself. And I know that might sound strange for me to call this military sci-fi, but I mean, really think about it. If you strip away, like, the time period and the aesthetic and the technology and just look at the actual mold of the story itself, it fits pretty securely into the military sci-fi definition. So that's about it. This book was a letdown, especially the climax, but it wasn't terrible at the end of the day. So that's everything and I will see you guys soon and... All right, you already know what to do. Subscribe and all that. Bye.