While there are two book twos in Matthew O. Duncan's 'New Terra Sagas', depending on when you bought yours, there's only one book three and that's this one, 'The King's Stone'. As it has a firm reliance on 'The Prophet's Stone' being its predecessor, I now understand fully why Duncan spun 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix' out of the trilogy to become a standalone volume, albeit a story within a growing universe. I'm not sure that there's a franchise name yet but it's home not only to these initial four books but also his later 'Lt. Reilly' series and its spinoffs.

Once again, there's a good side, which is the writing, and a bad side, which is the presentation. I will happily get that out of the way quickly. The cover art is once again gorgeous, but the text is displayed in three different font sizes on the Acknowledgements pages alone, there aren't any first line indents and the paragraphs thus have a blank line between them in order to delineate themselves. The page numbers start too early and there's even a typo in the first paragraph, a typo that's repeated four times out of five across the first two pages. An "axel" is a jump that's used in figure skating. An "axle" is what you find connecting two wheels. It doesn't look good.

Fortunately, as I mentioned, there's the writing, because Duncan is a natural-born storyteller. However nitpicky I get about the technicalities of publishing, especially when it happens to be self-publishing, where first impressions really matter, he draws me into his stories effortlessly and immediately and ultimately that's what counts. This time he starts us out on New Terra, a fantasy world within a science fiction framework, with a string of regular characters so we can feel comfortable, then shakes the whole thing up like an evil puppeteer.

Initially, everything is fine after the challenges set in 'The Prophet's Stone' were met. Time has moved along. Roy is happily working with his son Timothy on their farm. His daughters Philissa and Sara are both engaged, which takes Roy aback because he's been caught up in the flow of it all and hasn't realised that everybody's growing up. He's even more caught aback by the sight of an Alliance dropship coming into land, because the treaty they signed prohibits contact.

The more I think about this setup, the more I think Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate when the country was very deliberately closed to the world. The start of this book marks the arrival of the black ships when Commodore Perry forced it back open again and the results are as epochal and as traumatic as this real life equivalent. But, there's a reason. Aliens have attacked one of the other kingdoms and the Alliance put that invasion down but there are many dead and now that there's such a new awareness of New Terra, it's time to renegotiate that treaty.

Of course, Roy was never supposed to be on New Terra to begin with, so he's taken away to face a court martial and Timothy isn't just onboard ship, he attempts to free his father, who doesn't want to be freed. He knew what he did and he'd absolutely do it again, but he'll also accept the consequences of his actions, as a good soldier. Fortunately, he doesn't have to because he soon discovers that King Waldron has appointed him Ambassador to the Alliance, requiring that his charges be dropped in order for negotiations to begin. That certainly seems a good way out!

From here, we follow a number of different plotstrands, which will naturally merge together at the end because this is the end of a trilogy. One follows those negotiations and remains firmly science fiction, very much in the vein of 'The Last Flight of the Phoenix' and featuring plenty of the same characters, especially Juan, who's now Capt. Gonzales with Fleet Intelligence. There's a new enemy, the Bonatar, whose weapons use T-plasma, but there's also a shared enemy who are known only as UH-17. They travel through space without ships and eat T-plasma as food. My impression was swarms of xenomorphs as space locusts. They're seriously dangerous.

Back on New Terra, Roy's wife Katreena needs to face up to her royal background as Princess of Bryerstone, which she does, touring the new Alliance village that's set up to support a military presence and normalising this huge change to their world. This is alternately a very happy plot strand, making new friendships and forming new connections, and a very unhappy one, as men from both New Terra and the Alliance battle incursions by UH-17 aliens. Duncan is never one to skimp on death and the body count quickly mounts on both sides.

And on Earth, we revisit a story we've already read but which no longer exists outside the pages of 'The Prophet's Stone' because of how that book wraps up. It bleeds through neatly though, so Timothy staying with Roy's sister Vickie and meeting her neighbour's daughter Joy doesn't feel like the first time it technically is. They get to know each other all over again, with moments of detailed deja vu where they remember shared experiences that they know never happened, in this timeline at least. And, while I'm invested in New Terra and in the fight against UH-17, this is the thread where the most intense emotions are generated. Damn, there are some emotional scenes with these two!

All in all, this is a very satisfying final instalment to an unusually generous trilogy. I won't spoil how it ends, but there are enough prophecies and destinies involved to render at least some of it inevitable. There's also the broader series to consider and the realisation that some things, once done, can't be trivially undone. Perhaps Duncan's greatest achievement here is to ensure that we stay the course and care about those left at the end, even if we realised ahead of time that it's where the book had to wrap. And that sounds sad, which isn't my intention. Ultimately this is about change, which is always going to include happiness and sadness.

Having wrapped up this long trilogy of four books, I do plan to dive into the 'Lt. Reilly' books at some point, but probably not right now, because I have lots of other books and series by Arizona authors on my shelves to work through, especially after a very rewarding Phoenix Fan Fusion. I didn't make it to Duncan's panel but I'm told that it went very well and the local authors in the vendor hall seemed to be having a good even, too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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