please stop reading if you have not read Harbingers yet. i want to start a discussion while it is still fresh in my mind, but i don't want to ruin it for anyone.
spoilers follow
OK, I think Harbingers is the best RJ novel since Gateways. I didn't really care for Infernal (didn't care for the plot, but it was still Jack and that made it a better read than 9/10ths of the stuff out there) and Crisscross was good, but not as good as the previous few. Harbingers was great (really, really great). It tied up some loose ends, explained some things in better depth, and made me think about the conflict of cosmic forces in a whole new way.
I love the fact that this book focuses on the Ally/Adversary conflict in such detail. In past novels we were always told that the Ally was opposed to evil, but not necessarily good. I always assumed this meant that the Ally was just kind of indifferent. The whole colored-glass discussion helped explain why the Ally is not as interested in us as the Adversary (though a creature that craves eating glass was a little too much of a stretch of the metaphor, I think). While the Ally wants human life on Earth, it does not concern itself with human morals (It might not even understand them). But now that we know that the Ally is behind killing Jack's family off and not the Otherness it puts a whole new take on what the Ally is. The Ally is not about morals. It is all about winning, and the means are not as important as the end. Makes me wonder what the Ally will do with Earth if he wins. Does he really just want to admire it?
This explains better why Mother (the Lady) wants to get rid of both the Ally and the Adversary. She is Mother Earth (implied as such, anyway), and has this planet's life in her best interests. She is pro-human life, while the Otherness is anti-human life. That makes her good in my book, but she might turn out to be manipulative in her own right. The whole 'Does anti-evil mean good?' question really gets put through the ringer here. I think some philosophy class could have a field day with this book.
Excellent book. I loved it. Only two small gripes. 1) Wow chips are not called Wow anymore. They got rebranded Light. But I'm not sure how long ago that happened... it might have occured after the book went to press. 2) Please, no more hackers that have some code he wrote that can crack 128-bit encryption. Using 128-bit encryption there are 2^128 possible combinations. I've read that trying every possible combination would take longer to crack than waiting for the Universe to eventually implode.
One question/obseration: Do you think Glaeken's wife has Alzheimer's to make him a better spear? It would seem to fit with what we now know about the Ally. I wonder if any of this new info about the Ally/Heir/Sentinel was added to the new Nightworld.