To each their own, I enjoyed the trilogy as an excellent mixture of drastically hard sci-fi mixed with delusional fantasy.

I do agree that he perfected concepts in further books, but also found he didn’t particularly deviate from those ideas in truly meaningful ways.

For example: The Great North Road did an excellent job at mixing portals and biological science fiction, but that concepts like brain computer interfaces remained largely the same and too familiar despite being a distinctly separate universe. It felt repeated and old hat.

Good book nonetheless, I was just a bit disappointed he rehashed the same ideas without deviation or too much expansion.