By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Cryptum. I simply adore Bear's writing style in that book, his language seems to have a very Homeric-style edge to it at times; his build-up of the characters was very well executed and I felt very involved in the story.
The way he described the battle of the Capitol was masterful:
I flash on brief moments of breathtaking, awful splendor, sharpened by terror: the rapid approach of Halo's inner landscape, our first close-up glimpse of thin layers of clouds, rivers, mountains, desert, vast stretches of green, then thousands of kilometers of engraved silver-blue, naked foundation material interrupted by towering, four-pronged power stations - all unadorned by hard-light decor.
...
Then - the unexpected. While the enormous yet ephemeral band of Halo slowly disappeared into the violet-black maw at the center of the portal, somthing brilliant white pushed through from the other side.
...
The fortress's commanders and ancillas must have known they were dooming themselves as well as the Halo. The installation began a spectacular disintegrative sequence. The visible half of the ring bent in opposite directions, then shattered into five great arcs. We passed near the largest of these segments, perhaps a hundred kilometers from the inner-surface. Released from the rotational integrity of the full ring, the segment moved outward, given an additional outward twist by the asymmetric breakup. One end swept towards us like a great swinging blade.
...
Kilometer-wide swaths of forest waved like flags in a slow wind, shivered off a dust of trees - and broke apart into chunks. In the increasing violence, the surface released a storm of boulders, followed by immense cross-sections of sedimentary layers, and finally, entire mountains still capped with snow. Our doom seemed inevitable. Either we would be struck by the nearest rim wall or by the great clods and silvers of material spilling over - or we would be caught up in flying volumes of ocean, now, in the shadow of the portal, freezing into spectacular ice sculptures, flying bergs and snow. I sat within the dust mote of our craft, incapable of speech. I had never witnessed anything so utterly awesome - not even the destruction of the San'Shyuum world.
I eagerly await the third book.
Posted by: Avatar Korra
All of them are good, except the forerunner trilogy.
So The Flood > Cryptum? trololololololol
[Edited on 05.09.2012 9:58 AM PDT]