Now this is a great coda. I wasn’t a fan of the ending of the ninth book, it didn’t really add anything, for me. This, though, is elegant and mollified one of my gripes with the series: What happened to Naomi’s son, though?

What begins as something I feared would be just some distant struggle on a biome, becomes a nuanced snapshot of trauma and a question that is at the heart of the series, which sometimes gets lost amongst the action. Where are we going, as a species. Our survival hardcoded helps sometimes, but also hinders us. What happens here can be viewed in two different ways. Is the outcome predetermined by trauma, and it was the ‘wrong’ thing to do? Or, was it an action that might actually give the settlement a better shot, and the others just do not have the viewpoint to know that.

In a way, it makes me even more annoyed at the epilogue from the main book, because this is simply a much, much better ending.