I thoroughly enjoyed the first two novels and eagerly anticipated finishing the series, which was probably why I was so disappointed with Only Human. This novel fell flat and instead of ending the trilogy with a bang, it ended it with a whimper. It’s hard to say exactly where the novel went wrong, but so much about it annoyed me. I didn’t care for how the main characters reacted to both their time on the foreign planet and then their return. I wasn’t buying how the people of Earth reacted to the aftermath of the alien robots arriving on the planet and killing so many, with the establishment of concentration camps for those who had a higher concentration of alien DNA. It just didn’t make any sense to me. And whereas I enjoyed the style of storytelling, through journal entries and interviews, in this novel it got ridiculous at times. There would be situations where the characters are being chased and shot at but were still dictating a running commentary of the situation. It felt artificial and trite. Oh, and the use of alien words that I didn’t understand was utterly pointless.
That’s not to say that the entire novel was bad. There was some level of intrigue to it, but mostly it didn’t work. In particular the robot fight at the end was just dumb. If you read and enjoyed the first two novels, you would be better off not reading this and coming up with your own ending.
