u/CryingLikeTheWind — reddlx

TLDR: Fun space opera with excellent worldbuilding that is way too long.

*****

The good:

Worldbuilding. The Commonwealth feels like a vast, interesting, lived-in place. His worldbuilding is fun and creative and generally awesome.
Sci-fi: When he's actually doing sci-fi, it's great. Unfortunately, he very often does not do sci-fi in these books (see below).
Scene-building. There are some extremely memorable scenes in these two books. Huge, exciting, easily visualized space scenes that I won't soon forget.
Plot. The plot is interesting and complex, but takes a loooong time to get to resolution.
The aliens. The creation story and subsequent plot work is fantastic.

The so-so:

Prose: I didn't love his prose and found it wildly inconsistent. He has some wonderful sections followed by tons of inane banter between characters that doesn't advance the plot or worldbuilding at all.
Characters. There are some excellent characters and even more useless ones. Cutting the character count to flesh out the main characters would have helped the books.
Humor. He tries to be funny but it mostly doesn't land.
Ozzie's journey. I loved some of the fantasy aspects but felt he was an underutilized character until the end.

The bad:

Treatment of female characters. It’s bad, really bad.
Sexy scenes. Too many and all poorly done.
Words and more words. "Why use one word when you can use 20?" - Peter F. Hamilton, probably. There are entire sections that could have and should have been cut.
Dialogue. There is enough cringe dialogue in these two enormous books to fill a decent-sized novella of pure cringe. You just have to roll with it if you want to finish. It's goofy and awkward and it goes on and on. I suppose you could call it campy but I found it exhausting.
It's a sci-fi book, but there is a LOT of whodunit police procedural. I think he added so many extraneous characters just to help the whodunit aspect.
Repetition. The editors of these books, if there were editors, must have skimmed a lot of it because SO many phrases are repeated over and over again. "Son of a bitch!", "Goddammit!", and of course the infamous "enzyme bonded concrete."

*****

These points might seem pretty negative, but overall I mostly enjoyed the books. I can't really strongly recommend them because of the cons, but if you're patient and can deal with the negatives, there is a fun space opera buried in those 2,000 pages (or 78 hours of audio).