The Firmament of Flame

The Universe After #3

by Drew Williams

For fans of Firefly and James S. A. Corey's Expanse novels, The Firmament of Flame is the third installment in Drew Williams' Universe After series.

For nearly a century, the Justified have been searching for gifted children to help prevent the return of the pulse. Until recently, they thought they were the only ones.

Jane Kamali and her telekinetic protégé Esa, now seventeen, barely managed to claim victory against a Cyn--a being of pure energy--hell bent on hunting down the gifted. Now they face an army.

The Cyn and their followers will stop at nothing to find Esa and the others. No one knows what they want, but Jane, Esa, and their allies in the Justified are determined to find out.

Even if they have to go to the ends of the known universe to do it.

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Audiobook, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fantasy

368 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 2020

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

THERE HAD BETTER BE A FOURTH BOOK IN THIS SERIES

This was incredibly, ridiculously good.

[Morgan McGuire · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first book in the series was good. The second one was an exhausting, nearly pointless chase scene. This third one has some good world-building, but the pacing is awful, the characters blur together, and the writing is weak (you can only repeat "ouroboros" and "defilade" so many times to show off that you've learned two new words as an author, especially if you're an author whose go-to adjective is "fucking").

You'll find the following within the first few pages of the first chapter (so, not much of a spoiler). Sho has become pointless in the series, as Esa's Gift essentially incorporates his now. Javier, Marek, and Preacher are forgotten until needed for some minor comment, even though they are in nearly every scene. Esa and Jane are indistinguishable, which is particularly confusing as they alternately narrate chapters, and if it weren't for the name at the top, you wouldn't know who is who. Esa has essentially become one super-character who absorbs all of the others, breaking up the party dynamic and destroying any interesting conflict between them. And to make it worse, there are two new antagonists...who are exactly the same as Esa and Jane. The characters even say that they are exactly the same.

There's a great plot twist around 75% of the way through, which is then squandered by a confusing and generic ending. This series had a lot of potential, but it felt like Williams raced through it after the first novel without sufficient critical feedback on the overall plot structure. He writes great snarky combat scenes, but doesn't handle the larger elements well.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m going to SCREAM I need the next book immediately please and thanks

[Scott - Book Invasion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fun ride with varying POVs between Jane and Esa. A bit more of the same but with higher stakes and the final boss wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. Still a good finale to a really fun and action packed trilogy.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

*mild spoilers* Everything on Goodreads calls this a trilogy/3 book series, but after a very incomplete ending, I scrounged online and found this referred to as the "penultimate" book in the series. I think I would have enjoyed this book more if I hadn't been waiting for the series conclusion and getting closer and closer to the end wondering how it was going to wrap up... Also, lots of repetitive explaining of things and really couldn't tell much difference between the personalities of the two narrators.

[Hobbitviolinist · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this is the last book in this series I’m going to be unhappy. Write more Drew! Also, that was incredible and it made me feel a great number of things.

[Gareth Howells · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent third part in the story. It takes a while to get going I think, but once it's hit the big moments when the plot moves forward, the set up pays off and the final moments in the book are especially rewarding.
Some of the characters blended together in my mind a little, but I think that could be a fault in how I was reading it as much as the writing.
I really enjoyed it though...

[Nathan Chattaway · Rating 3 out of 5]

This third installment in the series is enjoyable but tending towards a watered-down blend of action and soul-searching angst. But what's my motivation? half the characters seem to be yelling.
The author has toned down his penchant for ramming emphasis down the reader's throat and the profanity dial has been wound back from 11 to about 7.

Tiny potential spoiler alert follows.








Going in, I thought this was going to be the series finale but that isn't the case.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason I thought this series was very popular but perhaps not. 'The Universe After' series has a sharp decline in Goodreads ratings as it goes on, which is normal even for popular series. Even A Song Of Ice And Fire (2.5 mil ratings on the first book) loses at least 50,000 ratings with each new instalment. Still I don't think I've seen a drop-off this steep on this site as for Drew Williams' series. As I write this, this third book has 360 ratings. That doesn't mean it sold low, it could just mean it doesn't appeal to the core Goodreads user base, but I do wonder if this was a total flop. Unfortunately (I hope not due to critical Goodreads reviews) it seems Williams stepped away from writing sometime after 2021, or shut down all his author-related web presence anyway. It doesn't seem like he had a lot of enthusiasm for promo, and it also seems (from the small amount that I can find online) that the pandemic left him unsettled; perhaps he just didn't want to do something as taxing as write and promote novels anymore, which is reasonable...

Now over 5 years since this book was published, there's no indication we'll ever get another book. Despite disliking this series I do kind of hope there eventually is a fourth part. Because this clearly isn't meant to be the conclusion of the story, it ends on such a cliffhanger.

I think 'The Firmament Of Flame' was a big improvement over 'A Chain Across The Dawn'. Book 1 was from Jane's viewpoint, book 2 was from Esa's. This time we get a few chapters from each then it switches over. The dual viewpoints actually work well. Jane is a better narrator, but Esa is more serious and less of a sullen teen by now. The unfortunate result is their chapters do read the same, we're not getting drastically differing character voices.

Actually, there isn't a lot of development of our heroes in this book, Williams focusing more on event and action than quiet, telling character moments. We have what seems like about 8-10 people in the crew now (more if you count the ships and their personalities). Really apart from Jane and Esa I don't think we learn much more about anyone; Williams seems to want to give everyone a cool moment, but I didn't feel closer to Javier or Sho or Sahluk or JackDoes by the time this ended. I wonder if a smaller, more focused team could have been a better approach. In general the subplots here just aren't very interesting. (Oh, Esa gets a girlfriend, who has very few characteristics except being cute - and Jane continues to be romantic with Javier, who has no real characteristics except being the most annoyingly quippy in the book.)

Apart from the often off-putting "they fly now? Holy shitballs" humour, the writing is pulpy but mostly engaging. He's a chronic over-explainer, giving his characters' inner monologues paragraph after paragraph of 'maybe this, maybe that, maybe a third thing' exposition every time something actually happens. My reaction often was "I know this, I know the stakes". At several points - including the last pages, which are clearly meant to be of great importance - I just could not find anything interesting at all in what was written here. You know when you try reading a page three or four times and your eyes just keep sliding away without taking anything in? It's a bad sign when you have that reaction to what is clearly meant to be the series' "Leia and Chewie on the Falcon at the end of Empire Strikes Back" moment.

Over the whole series, but especially this book, I have felt Williams is trying to emulate the feel of several space-opera classics. Here I felt he was really going for Mass Effect meets Firefly. Mass Effect in the fact we have a small and focused team of specialists in a universe of multiple alien races in serious conflict who have to unite to defy a greater threat. Firefly in the fact that a small, quippy group of rag-tag characters who don't always get along but have to do the right thing and pull together to save the day. Now, those beloved franchises have a pretty weighty legacy in modern SF, and that makes emulating them a pretty tall order. I don't think Williams pulls it off. In most of the book, we have the kind of trashy, over-determined feel of Mass Effect 3, and the most annoyingly smug humour of Firefly. (Still - if you really like Serenity and ME3, I think it's worth checking this whole series out.)

I really quite strongly feel that Williams' writing goes to pieces when he's writing villains. His villains are so one-note and boring. It was bad in book one with the poorly-written fascists, got worse in book two with the Cyn and their pseudo-religious rambling, and in this one we get those plus "evil bad guy who thinks they're justified", and we get that kind of character twice. That's a tough character to write well, I think, and it's fairly wretched here.

You can tell though that he really likes his heroic characters and that has kind of helped me to push through. The books don't seem to have an ironic remove, or a morally grey approach where we're expected to think wow, this ambiguity is so impressive. I don't object to those being used in books, but I do wonder if they're overused now in SF and fantasy. Still, loving the characters too much presents its own problems. At times it feels like Williams is trying to write cozy sci-fi where the point is loving the characters and enjoying seeing them grow and their lives improving, but also giving the story the stakes of space opera, which is a tough line to walk.

Criticism of this book really feels like kicking a puppy, kind of like disliking the Becky Chambers stuff. It's so sincere that I feel like I'm looking right into a guy's soul and saying "this kind of sucks, man". It's made worse by the fact that the guy seems to have been driven away from writing and that makes me feel guilty about not liking the stuff. Overall, I have to admit I'm not a fan. But if book 4 materialises I'll be here for it.

6/10

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series just keeps getting better. The world building is on point and the ending had me on the edge of my seat.

[Randal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ooh, second-book syndrome in a third book, that's new!
Middle books in trilogies are notorious for being weak links, where the author expounds on stuff that is fairly tangential to the main plot, after they have gotten your attention with book one and before they wrap things up in book three.
That's this one. Padding things out is a lengthy and deeply unsatisfying subplot involving Jane's mysterious background so Jane almost but not killed this person once before, watching them spiral to what seemed like certain doom. And here, Jane watches her fall to almost certain doom. C'mon man, she's either dead or you're going to try to wring even more pages out of this marginal character.
I was expecting this to wrap up in three books, and it certainly could have. I don't feel like there's a lot more I want to know about the main characters, there's the token sidekick death, and a multipage boss battle. Although I am glad it didn't go full The Return of the King and have the invisible / unnoticed Preacher / Gollum character fall into the Crack of Doom with the McGuffin. I'm good. Let's slap an ending on this and call it a day. Instead, there's a cliffhanger, introducing a new plot twist that means this almost has to be a five- or six-book series. I don't think I'm invested enough in the Universe After to read another book with the same characters / world, let alone two or three.
Part of it is that Williams has run out of interesting ways to describe the lennnngggtthhy battle scenes. If I have to read about Esa coiling the energy around her fist like barbed wire one more time ... sigh. And why barbed wire? That's a western thing, from the first half of the 20th century. Why not razor wire, barbed wire's grown-up cousin? Something, anything else. I'm starting to feel like the longer this series goes, the more the limits of the author's wordsmithing become A Thing. I called the series an homage to Scalzi. I think it's starting to show why John Scalzi is JOHN F***ING SCALZI and Drew Williams isn't. 3.5 stars.

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Working for the justified, Jane and her protege Esa, were able to finally take down one of the Cyn, a being of pure energy that is hell-bent on the hunting the gifted, but are now up against an army of them. In order to finally gain a foothold and come up with a way to permanently fight back, Jane and her justified group will need to go to the ends of the known universe on the heels of a secret weapon which could finally help turn the tide.

What I Liked:
- helped to expand the universe and help bring some understanding to the enemies
- felt more like a sequel than the last book, which felt more like a divergence

What I didn't Like
- from what I understood, this is the last volume of the series and there was no ending, in fact nothing is resolved, the book ends as a massive threat is basically found which will be world ending and the book just ends

While I only list one thing I didn't like, its so massive that it tanks the whole series for me. It comes off that they had no idea where to go so it just had to end, so its a massive cop out and waste of time. If another volume gets written, great, I don't care anymore. The fact that the book spent the whole time building up this threat just to not deal with it, is so aggravating that I wouldn't recommend anyone bother with this series.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 3 of 3. Jane, Esa and their posse of Justified find a relic planet with clues to the riddle of who created the Barius robots, etc. Strangely or not only the gifted children could read the writing on the wall so to speak and Jane runs into her long dead past.
Run into the Cyn & Bright Wanderers building giant spaceships. Have a fight, kill a few and on to the next.
They take a long trek further to find another planet with Cyn and Bright Wanders scattered through out the place. Also, they learn why they were tracking down the gifted children.
They are welcomed to this next planet, but soon defeat enough to land and it's quiet, too quiet. Only the gifted can walk through the barriers. With their non gifted team mates left behind they again find an astonishing word from the past. Is it good news? While the gifted are welcomed by the planet it funnels their ungifted team into a trap. Battle with the Cyn.
Esa comes face to face with the goddess they have been hearing about and she's faced with choices. People get hurt, no humans die. The furnaces come to life and the Bright Wanderers show up with their dreadnaught ships.
There has to be a book 4. You just can't leave Jane and Esa looking out into the stars.

[Greg Frederick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm disappointed in this book. I was somehow under the impression that it was third book in a trilogy. Instead, it's more of an Empire Strikes Back.

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the author's focus seems to be more on selling the movie rights than writing a good book. There were several scenes that seemed to be written to be a great movie scene. But what that meant for the book is that it had only a movie's worth of intrigue, spead out over 400+ pages.

I kept finding myself taking breaks reading this. I had already grown to love the characters in the first book, and was forgiving of the second book's lacking plot, but this one just stalled out hard.

It's quite clear that the author felt quite clever in his big reveals. Unfortunately, a lot of it just added up to breaking the rules and pathways he'd already established in his world building.

I might return to a fourth book (assuming one is coming), but I need a serious break from his author. I would also need to read some pretty convincing reviews.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 rounded down to a 4 because of the ending.

I loved this trilogy and watching the characters grow and bond along the way. The world-building was at a good level for me personally, not so little it felt like a blank world but not overly so that the plot was bogged down describing everything.

I really hope for a fourth book because while this ending could suffice as an "ending" it, seemed clearly set up for more. I mean, we need to see how the defeat Ase and avenge Preacher!! Esa needs to make Meridian her official girlfriend, Sho needs his legs back, and Esa needs to prove she's the best Her there is. It's a shame the pandemic ruined the authors mood for writing but I sincerely hope he's been quietly working his way back at it.

I love this universe and hope for an eventual 4th book to see the Crew try and take back the Furnace, find the Palace and decide if they can/should stop the Pulse permanently.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like its predecessors, the story is a trio of big set pieces with minimal reflection between them, and in a classic case of sequelitis, the villains multiply (multiples of the heavy from book two), mirror (both the protagonists confront dark mirror images of themselves), and escalate (with a final antagonist whose powers are god-like, after the prior books ended with defeating seemingly unbeatable but definitely touchable foes), to the detriment of reading pleasure (the way most of each protagonists' character development is the other protagonist thinking about it rather than the story showing it is also disappointing). It's still fun (the characters are great), but hitting a point of diminishing returns.

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope there is going to be another book in The Universe After series. This one was really good, and it does provide a stopping point for the series, but there is more story to be told, I think.

This is space opera at its best, with the feel of military SF with the battles fought. The reader has some questions answered, but there are mysteries provoked by those answers.

The language is still a bit rough, but I think it suits the characters and isn't as frequent as in the first book.

The series is highly recommended for fans of science fiction/science fantasy. However, don't start with this book -- start with the first book. This is one of the cases that I would suggest checking for the omnibus volume with all three volumes published to date.

[Kyle O’Keefe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, I’ve had a good time with this series, and I really hope there’s a fourth book in the works because I need more after the ending of this one. The story and writing we a little bit repetitive and I feel like this could have been cut down a little, which is why I knocked a star off, but the plot was a banger and I fell completely in love with these characters. Two women both taking up the mantle of surrogate mother really does it for me and I was fully crying during preachers speech at the end. The experience was heightened by the exceptional audiobook which I highly recommend.

[Paul Bard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I deliberately read this slowly for enjoyment. Wow, what a successful third book.

The way he raised the stakes on the previous two books was brilliant. The plot was flawless. The action was superb.

I actually think less swearing might have helped this book a little. I’m very pro-sweating, but I felt like it distracted from the action.

I look forward to the sequels, confident he can pull it off. A really talented writer!

[Stephtacular · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book series is so underrated!! I absolutely love the characters and the story and I highly recommend to anyone that enjoyed The Expanse. This is that, but better and more focused around ass kicking females. Please don't sleep on this series and Drew please keep writing them. I adore them so much.

[Nathan Falky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the others, probably 3.5 stars, but definitely not enough for 4.

An interesting if somewhat disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.
Didn't love the final reveal.
Didn't really think all of the lore and backstory quite paid off.
Though the main character at least did develop further.
Enjoyable, but not my fav. And that's ok :)

[Shaun Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good ending to a fun trilogy. Good plot twists, Lots of "how are they going to get out of this?" moments. I was a touch disappointed in the final pages. The author had a great chance to wrap everything up nicely, but instead took the boring, cliched route of leaving pieces hanging for a possible sequel. Stop worrying about creating a perpetual income steam and just finish the story! If you are a decent author, you'll have new ideas! Tear out the last 4 pages and you have a great trilogy conclusion.

[Mark Edlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science fiction series - the third book in the Universe After series. The justified are tracking down some frightening bad guys. Great action sequences. Pretty sure there is going to be a fourth book.
No Canadian or pharmacy references.

[Zoe Neeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with other readers - there needs to be a fourth book!!!

I liked that in this book we got to experience the events from Esa and Jane’s perspective. It seemed like a nice progression from Jane’s POV in the first book and Esa’s POV in the second.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expansive story

Expansive story of life in the galaxy.
Life, love, pain, confusion, hope and battle.
Many battles to overcome blind faith, hate and zeal.

Characters and worlds grown in detail and complexity.

Such a fantastic series, which I hope has another book yet!

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating is based on anticipating an eventual 4th book, due to the lack of a proper (well... any...) true conclusion. I had a lot of fun with this book, this series is definitely a "popcorn movie" type of book for me but I really enjoyed it.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Pat King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Miche D · Rating 4 out of 5]

audio book.

solid.

[Jane Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This third installment was not as good as book 2 - I loved that book so much. The ending was kinda meh as well for me. I suppose it made sense, but too cliche for my taste.