I found out a few weeks ago that a newer fourth novel existed to one of my favorite sci fi trilogies of childhood. Now, I sortve wish that I was still ignorant of that fact. It's not that the book is bad or even worse than the first three (which I loved!) but that i didn't feel that it added anything great to the more sweeping story or had something that needed to be said. The plot was okay, but the characters just didn't seem there - they were all so dynamic in the original, and so flat in this later book. Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that there was nothing new, nothing changed in their reality at the end of the book. I think: why bother then?