Bad ending for a good story otherwise...

A great conclusion to to the series, a solid amount of action and intrigue. There are a great number of allusions that come fully around as Michael and Gabriel are clearly a Kane and Abel with one even needing to be able to be sacrificed, there is even a little god vs the devil at play. Maya and Gabriel are a slight twist on Romeo and Juliette, star crossed lovers and all. Even the character of of Samurai is a full on text book example of Joseph Campbell's Hero Journey. Not that the others don't but not as much as Samurai who was the only common character in the novel thrust in this fantastic shadow world only to suffer a decisive lost followed by his journey of discovery and rebirth. It's great how Hawks is able to develop so many well rounded characters and layered storylines.

John Twelve Hawks delivers a lackluster conclusion to the Fourth Realm trilogy, after the great start with The Traveler, and less impressive The Dark River. In his author’s note, Hawks feels he has explored his world to the fullest and explained everything he needs to, and while some questions are always apparent at the end of a series, The Golden City leaves readers asking a lot of questions and “What abouts?”

Hawks does a good job of clueing in the reader on who’s who, as it’s been a couple of years since the last book. The quick rundown: there are Travelers who are able to travel beyond our world into other realms and have existed for a very long time; the Tabula is a group seeking to kill all Travelers and wipe them out; Harlequins are specially trained people appointed to protect Travelers. The Tabula now seeks to complete the Panopticon, which will allow essentially total control and world domination by the Vast Machine. Gabriel, one of the last Travelers, along with his Harlequin, Maya, must work to put a group together to stop the Tabula and bring down the Vast Machine once and for all.

Hawks addresses and resolves the story of the Vast Machine and the Panopticon, meanwhile the “Golden City” of the title is only briefly visited in one of the realms, while in another is a strange place previously visited in The Dark River better known as Hell, while in yet another realm there exists a strange culture of people who consider themselves gods because they have computers and their own Panopticon in place, while the rest of society are simple peasant folk. With no doubt more realms to be discovered, Hawks provides an entertaining simple story in The Golden City, but leaves a large universe relatively unexplored.

Originally written on October 6 2010 ©Alex C. Telander.

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3.75 Not a bad book but not as good as the others. Wraps up nicely but it does leave the series open for more books.

I was so looking forward to this book and I love the series so I decided to give this a 4 despite how disappointing I found it.

As always, the writing was great and there were a lot of good memes in there, the whole thing really comes off as a sort of super sigil, which is great. Unfortunately, it was pretty anticlimactic and predictable. What was worse was the character development. To save this from being a spoiler I'll just say it was flat.

The part that I hated the most (on a personal note) was Nighthawk. His character was SUCH a cliche. I think I might fall over dead if I ever find a terminally ill character that isn't (A) inspiring or (B) bitter. The fact that he had MD really annoyed me too, given his lame (for lack of a more appropriate pun-worthy word) pity filled personality.

Least favorite of the series, anti-climatic ending

If the fear that 9/11 caused is any indication as to how governments will use fear to control people to get what they want (in the case of 9/11 oil at the expense of chasing a 'bad guy' completely uninvolved with the actual incident) John Twelve Hawks 'Vast Machine' might well be on its way, if not here already. A very interesting read as a triology, although the other two books were far better than this one. This book felt really rushed and made me read it that way as well. So many events happened in a short paragraph and were over before you realized they had begun. Kind of a disappointment to the ending of this series, though the actual end of the book fit perfect and was satisfying.

The editing of this book is painfully bad. It might actually be the worst I've ever seen.

The book itself is... okay. The first book of this trilogy was the first book I ever read by choice, so it holds a special place in my life, but I found this book to be a disappointing end to the series. I suppose it hit all the right plot beats, but it did it without passion or oomph.

The Golden City ended predictably: with a speech about the evils of the modern surveillance society we live in, laced with new age feel good philosophy about freedom and privacy. The story was...interesting, and at point gripping, but in many ways, predictable. The final ending leaves something to be desired, in it's resolution and completion.

However, it was worth reading if just for the thought provoking nature of the issue JTH wants his readers to address: do we have too much surveillance? Online, our transactions, cameras everywhere...does it limit our freedom and privacy? Are we losing our ability to function as independent creatures?