Catalyst Gate

Let me say up front that I am reviewing the series here, rather than just this book -- and that there WILL be spoilers, so stop reading here if you don't want any.

I liked these books: the writing is great, the characters are human enough to be interesting -- even the ones that aren't (human, that is) -- the overall plot development is good, and the whole adventure resolves well, with some galaxy-spanning implications. Kudos for that, Megan, and I will be looking out for more from you!

However....

Pedant and spoiler alerts, BTW

The stories describe the use of gates to travel between star systems, and we are told that communications in- and out-systems use gate technology -- yet light speed does not seem to be a factor, although no ships are FTL, meaning characters literally have communications in real time across distances that MUST involve serious lag times before they even get to gates. I mean, communicating between Luna and Terra takes more than a second one way; how then can the book characters have chats across greater distances??

Another niggle was the lack of any idea of using a simple blood test to differentiate the nanite transformed folk or synthetic people from normals: if Campbell could do it in his legendary 60+ year-old tale of reawakened Antarctic monsters, why couldn't it be done here? Sure, it would have obviating much confusion and shortened the books quite a lot, but if this civilisation can build androids and fix people with nanites, devising a rapid test for whether or not someone is transformed would be child's play.

There's also the mention -- repeated several times in the second book and in the third -- of our sun becoming a red dwarf as it ages. I hate to say it, but it'll become a white dwarf if it goes along the main sequence, and there's nothing to indicate it won't!

All in all, then, a little flawed -- but a damn good read. Even if Arden deserves a better pronoun than "they".