Recent Childe cycle?

[Pellinore]

I've really enjoyed Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle in the past, and I've seen that in the past year or so another book, Antagonist, was published posthumously coauthored with David Wixon. I had stopped reading the cycle after Young Bleys (I haven't read Other or Antagonist). I was just wondering if anyone has read those two and whether or not they are worth reading.

[Prego]

I would not recommend Other or Antagonist to anyone unless they're Childe Cycle completists. The books suffer from bloat... about 60,000 words' worth of story apiece, in books far longer.

Antagonist, begun by Dickson but completed by his associate David Wixon, particularly annoyed me because...

SPOILERS

...the book is not always consistent with The Final Encyclopedia. For example, in TFE we're told a couple of times that Bleys' half-brother Dahno is dead, and that his death was somehow a result of Bleys' machinations. In Antagonist, the conversation where Bleys discusses Dahno's death with Hal is rewritten to reflect somebody's change of heart on the subject... Dahno isn't dead after all!

Also,

the Bleys of the three books written from his point of view is not, by the end of Antagonist, the same Bleys we meet several times as the adversary in TFE. Have a look at his conversation with Hal in the tunnel near the end of TFE... then look at it as it's presented in Antagonist. This isn't Bleys, this is some impostor who lacks the real Bleys' self-confidence (and apparently a lot of his knowledge!)

[Pellinore]

Thanks-- I had a sinking suspicion they weren't as good as the rest of the cycle. Its interesting that the cycle went so far downhill from Tactics of Mistake and the earlier books. I might read them eventually, since I've read everything else in the cycle.

I read Young Bleys and liked it, but I found the Ahrens storyline less interesting than the Mayne storyline. I bought Other, but it had been long enough since I had read Young Bleys that I had difficulty picking up with the story. I suppose I'll have to reread that one before I finish up the cycle.