The Fires of Aurelius

It’s ok. Didn’t finish got boring.

Mr. Kerns,

The first book in this series completely hooked me. I read the second two books in as many days. This universe that you’ve created, the complex and amusing dynamics between characters, the moral questions of privacy and government and free will… well, your passion shines through your writing, and that’s why I kept reading.

Then I read this book. By far not the worst book I have ever read, but I knew even before I read the afterword that your passion for this project was somewhere in deep space. It happens, and I respect you for trying to fight through enough to give the series closure. That being said, I hope that at some point your love of writing makes its way back to you. It’s fairly impossible to completely kill off a passion (trust me, I’ve tried), so just remember that you are in no way obligated to finish any series. If you rewrite this last book in 20 years, I’ll read it. If you leave the series as it is, that’s okay too. I’d rather wait for a book that you can be proud of (and enjoy writing) than read a book in which you clearly feel like you’re having your teeth pulled, no matter how much I want to know whether or not Srexx ends up taking over the entire human race.

Mr. Kerns, you have a gift. Despite all of the teeth-pulling and hair-tearing frustration of writing this book, I still saw moments of you genuinely having fun with the universe you’ve created. They reminded me why I love reading, and kept me reading this book until the end.

Thank you for sharing your gift with me. I wish you all the best.

The author started getting bogged down in world building partway through Haven Ascendant. I personally believe that the evolving storyline conflicted with the fundamental nature of the protagonist with whom the author felt a close personal link.

I appreciate that the author wanted to satisfy his readers by providing closure in the storyline. But the result was a rushed and mediocre novella that should have been priced lower (or never released at all). In my opinion, the author should have either enlisted a co-author to help breathe new life into the series, or just hit pause and pivoted to other ideas.

This is a shame because I enjoyed the protagonist and the quirky alien AI that formed the core of the series. The addition of an ancient adversary seeking to recover the technological remnants of their vanquished foes could have made for compelling reading in terms of the manner in which the Haven Protectorate and the rest of humanity responded. Who knows, perhaps some fragment of the supposedly vanquished foe still existed somewhere within or external to the galaxy? We will never know…