In this final part of his 'Asgard' trilogy, Brian Stableford works through all his themes to a conclusion. However, there is only so much you can do with a story where you've already revealed the existence of machine intelligences in the artificial world of Asgard, and getting another volume out of the idea of one group chasing another on a trip down through the various levels of the world was going to take some doing. Thus we get a lot of telling rather than showing, with what seems like whole chapters of expository lumps and Mike Rousseau's internal monologues as he first realises that he has become host to an AI hitchhiker that may or may not be dormant, and then has his consciousness cloned so that it can try to reach the centre of the world via a sort of cyberspace before Rousseau reaches it physically. This virtual journey involves an excursion into a sort of fantasy world, complete with heroic fantasy trappings, with a large number of borrowings from Rousseau's surprisingly deep knowledge of Earth mythologies (for a character who was born off-world and has never visited Earth). Given that the world took its name from Norse myth, Stableford rather stretches that idea beyond breaking point, making his characters draw mythological analogies to their situation and other characters, though Stableford is not beyond mixing and matching different mythological elements, ultimately to little end.

For all that Rousseau has been a cynical protagonist who prefers to live by his wits, the denouement is rather out of character and not particularly climactic; the best bits of the plot's climax actually occur a couple of chapters early and turn out to be red herrings. Indeed, Stableford has used the chapter end cliff-hanger throughout the trilogy, and so he had to keep raising the stakes in cliff-hanger peril in the full knowledge that our protagonist has always managed to escape in some way or other up to now. Translating one copy of Rousseau into a virtual world only enables the peril to be ratcheted up, but with the same outcome.

Overall, I found this unsatisfying. ( )