Logos Run

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Jak Rebo, transuniversal message runner, the ‘sensitive' Loni Norr, and their companion ‘heavy' Hoggles are on the search for powerful AI Logos so that they can reestablish a network of stargates that's mostly fallen apart. But the powerful Techno Society that controls the remaining gates wants to use the network for its own purposes.

Review
I liked Logos Run better on this second read than the first time around, almost two decades back. But, more than it's predecessor, it feels like a mish-mash of familiar concepts forced into a road trip format.

It's a shame, because Dietz drops the most interesting part of the worldbuilding – the decaying, autonomous, interstellar ships. Even the barely functioning stargate network that could supplant or revive the ships is primarily a backdrop for an adventure story. Dietz takes a moderate stab at a character-based story, but the characters never really develop. And, in the same way as the first book, the story ends very abruptly, with little effort to resolve larger matters like the fate of humanity, which the quest has nominally been in service of. He also doesn't to much to resolve the character arcs, flat though they are.

As with the first book, this is made up largely of set pieces – the characters travel, get in trouble, resolve it, repeat. At some points (namely when they encounter the floating pyramids of the cover), there's little attempt at logic in the setups.

It's all fine, but also smacks strongly of missed opportunity – I'd have liked to hear more about the ships. And I felt a substantial resonance with Roger Zelazny's second Amber quintet, which if I recall correctly also featured a search for a powerful AI named Logos. In the end, what we're left with is a decent but forgettable adventure.