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Pretty good follow-up to The Peripheral, and more coherent in some ways. My only gripes are that there isn't enough conflict between the main characters--feels very Scooby gang vs. bad guys--and the end is a little too tidy.
An aside: The "stubs" (alternate worlds) of both of these novels are like hobbyist creations, and some characters feel more invested in them than others, irrationally so. If it's not your actual world that you live in, why should you care what happens there? Characters become invested in stubs on principle (the world is real to its inhabitants, and their sufferings are real) and as they get to know other people in those worlds. Writers inevitably develop attachments to the worlds and characters they create. Ergo, each of these novels is a like a stub, Gibson cares about the characters, and hence the too tidy endings.
An aside: The "stubs" (alternate worlds) of both of these novels are like hobbyist creations, and some characters feel more invested in them than others, irrationally so. If it's not your actual world that you live in, why should you care what happens there? Characters become invested in stubs on principle (the world is real to its inhabitants, and their sufferings are real) and as they get to know other people in those worlds. Writers inevitably develop attachments to the worlds and characters they create. Ergo, each of these novels is a like a stub, Gibson cares about the characters, and hence the too tidy endings.