RinoZ

Nine books ago Anthony was a single ant getting eaten by everything in a tunnel, and now he’s leading a trade delegation. Which is a sentence I enjoyed typing and which also tells you most of what you need to know about Antdustrial Revolution, because this is the book where the colony stops being a threat that eats provinces and starts being a supplier that sells to them. The termites are dealt with. The conquest phase is, for the moment, over. So RinoZ sends the ants out to make friends and sign deals in the fourth stratum instead, and the result is definitely a slower book than the earlier ones, with a lot more world-building than action.

I want to be clear that I still enjoyed it, because “slower” is going to do a lot of work in this review and I don’t want it read as a complaint about quality. The storyline itself is still interesting. The ants making relationships rather than levelling cities is a genuinely funny inversion after everything that’s come before, and there’s still a decent amount of the old business going on too, so it’s not as though the violence has been retired. It just isn’t the engine any more.

A land of water and light, and a sales pitch

The fourth stratum is the good bit. It’s described as a land of water and light, cities and kingdoms and empires carved into enormous mountains, and after eight books of tunnels and dark and things with too many legs, opening the ceiling up like that does land. There’s a real shift in what the series is willing to look at.

And the trade mission is a proper idea rather than a device. The whole colony repositioning itself from monster menace to skilled craftsfolk, going out to the non-monster races with actual goods to sell, is the sort of thing this series has been quietly earning since the ants first started making things instead of just eating them. Watching Anthony wheel and deal is not what I’d have predicted from the first book, where the entire plot was survive the next five minutes, and there’s something satisfying about a progression fantasy where the progression eventually turns into economics.

There’s also something quietly clever in what the trade mission does to the ants’ reputation. For eight books they’ve been the thing other species build walls against, and now they’re turning up with goods and terms and a willingness to negotiate, and the people on the other side of the table have to decide whether a monster that makes excellent tools is still a monster. RinoZ doesn’t hammer it. He just lets the meetings happen and lets you notice that the colony has become a country.

The problem is that a trade mission generates a lot of description and not much jeopardy. There are new races introduced, new cities, new political shapes to learn, and some threads that feel like they’re being quietly closed off rather than opened. It’s all interesting on the page. It’s just that a lot of it is furniture being moved into a room that isn’t going to be used until the next book.

The crew levels up, Anthony mostly doesn’t

You do still get growth and advancement, but not really where I expected it. Anthony himself doesn’t change all that much this time, which after Upping the Ante and everything since is a genuine gear change, since his evolutions have basically been the metronome the whole series runs on.

Instead it’s his guys. Tiny, Crinis and Invidia all push into tier seven, and Sarah and Vibrant come along with them, and on paper that’s a big deal. My frustration is that they aren’t really in the book enough for it to land the way it should. They get stronger somewhere off to the side of the page while the main narrative is busy negotiating, and I’d have traded a chunk of the fourth stratum tour for more time with the people actually doing the levelling. When your protagonist deliberately steps back, the supporting cast has to fill that space, and here they’re a bit too far away to do it.

There’s also a colony defence against a wave coming in from the fourth and fifth strata at once, which is the closest the book gets to an old-fashioned Chrysalis set piece, and it’s good. Properly good, actually, with the colony fighting on two fronts and the accumulated infrastructure of eight books finally getting used the way it was always meant to be. It’s just one island in a lot of talking, and it made me want three more of them.

Sarah and Vibrant have the same problem as the rest of the crew. They’re present, they matter, they advance, and I couldn’t tell you much about what either of them did with the page time they got. When a book spreads its growth across this many characters and then spends its attention elsewhere, the advancement starts to feel like something happening in a spreadsheet rather than in a story.

The filler problem, honestly

Here’s the honest bit. It feels like a filler book more than anything else. Not a bad one. Not a wasted one, because the world-building is real and the trade angle is a genuinely fresh direction for a series this far in. But when I try to point at what moved, the answer is mostly “the map got bigger and some relationships now exist.”

There’s a Church of the Path thread starting to simmer in the background, and new powers being introduced whose importance is obviously being banked rather than spent. That’s fine. Series do this, and long progression fantasy series basically have to do this, because you can’t escalate every single volume without the whole thing flying apart. I’ve just read enough of these to know a bridge when I’m standing on one.

And a religious faction is an interesting thing to point at a colony of intelligent ants, given the entire series has been about creatures the world has decided are vermin gradually proving otherwise. If the next book is the ants versus an organised faith that has a doctrinal position on whether they should exist, that’s a much better conflict than another bigger monster, and it’s the strongest reason I’ve got for thinking the slow patch was worth sitting through.

The other thing worth saying is that this is a very long book to be a bridge, and some of that length is status updates and description that a firmer hand would have trimmed. I read it happily. I also would not have noticed if it had been meaningfully shorter.

Five on the shelf, 4.7 in my head

I think I gave this a five on Goodreads, and if the scale let me be more precise I’d have put my mark at about 4.7, purely because of the filler feeling. That gap is the whole review really. I like this series enormously, I liked this book, and it’s still the weakest of the recent run for me. Go back to Upping the Ante and the difference in pressure per chapter is obvious, though that’s a slightly unfair comparison given book two had everything still to prove.

The thing that’s kept me keen is a small one. Even now, with Anthony as absurdly strong as he is, the book makes it clear he’s by no means the strongest thing out there. That’s a hard trick in progression fantasy, where the usual failure mode is the protagonist quietly outgrowing every threat until the stakes evaporate, and RinoZ keeps finding ways to put something bigger over the horizon.

So I’m waiting for the next one, and fairly impatiently. The fifth stratum looks like it’s going to be very interesting compared to where they are now, and this book has spent 800-odd pages laying track towards it. Which is a reasonable thing for a book to do, as long as the next one actually runs the train.