The Last President, by John Barnes

John Barnes's The Last President is the third and final book in the Daybreak series.  While I'm not unhappy to have read these books, I'm also not unhappy that they're over.  By the time I was part way through The Last President, I was thinking "OK, just wind this thing up!"  The whole series is rambling and jumps between too many story lines and characters.

In the fractured post-Daybreak United States, technology is pre-industrial and social and political structures are a mess.  While some remnants of the government are trying to rally the nation together for a presidential election, Daybreaker and tribals are teaming up to fight the government troops.  Over the course of the book, those who want to restore the Constitution and the United States fight a losing battle.  All the viable candidates for the president die.  In many regions, malevolent autocrats dig in and expand their powers.  Few rays of hope shine.

All the gloom and doom becomes tiresome.  Then at the end, Barnes drops an explanation for the moon guns that makes sense but is, at the same time, groan inducing.  I wondered about the moon gun, Daybreak technology, and the Daybreak virus, but even though I anticipated Barnes's explanation, tacking it on in the last few pages was either a cheap move or a set up for another trilogy.

All of this is not to say The Last President is without merit.  Barnes makes it work, somehow linking together lots of interweaving story lines.  But the full picture and the whole trilogy left me underwhelmed.