Karen Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series has finally reached a conclusion with Judge. Without giving away too much, I think it reasonable to say that it doesn’t end the way you might expect it to, and that’s probably a good thing, even though it might make Judge the weakest book in the series. I’m still not sure whether I like the ending, but that’s another matter entirely.

Meanwhile Karen can’t resist having a go at the state of modern journalism. Here’s the view from Eddie:

As he concentrated on the green rally, he watched a reporter doing a vox pop in the crowd. Whatever a reporter was these days, he had no idea: some wannabe twat gagging to do the job for free or even pay for the privilege, just to get some reassurance that they existed by seeing themselves permanently recorded in some news archive, so they’d be somebody. Next week, they’d be back serving donuts. When did reporting get to be about the reporter? In his day, it had still been about the story, outward-looking, inquiring; now it was a karaoke night.

Eddie, of course, is a 20th Century journalist. Times move on. I must admit that I was rather impressed by Karen’s idea that in the future news channels won’t bother making news themselves, they will just upload whatever “citizen journalists” send them, and then have the audience vote as to which stories they think are true. In the future, the Weekly World News will be recognized for the ground-breaking pioneer of new journalism that it actually was.