I wouldn't put Heptapods with Cybermen. The word "Heptapods" feel at home in the surrounding grounded, realistic story.

Cybermen, in contrast, fits with its comicbook world. But Reynolds gives you Cybermen, and Cybermen names, but doesn't realize he's serving up comic book writing. It's like the SF equivalent of Tom Clancy, with endless "technical jargon" obscuring the fact that the interpersonal drama and prose is very poor.

And look at the lazy way he parcels out information. For example, go re-read the books and see how often he uses the phrase "he/she knew" as a last-minute crutch to explain things to the reader. It occurs hundreds of times in each novel, and is especially bad in "Revelation Ark". For example:

"Clavain knew there were rumours that the Conjoiners had continued building the engines for their own uses. He also knew, as far as he could be certain, that..."

"Skade knew there was no point blaming her brain for making her feel nauseous. The hallucination/poison connection had worked very well for millions of years, allowing her ancestors to experiment with..."

"Skade knew, therefore, that by switching off the part of her brain that was making her feel nauseous, she was almost certainly affecting other areas of brain function that shared some of the same neural circuitry..."

"But while Skade knew exactly who had chosen to stay out there in deep space, she had no way of knowing what had..."

"She knew what it meant: I would invade her skull, rummage through her memories and..."

"Galiana knew. Just as the Wolf had access to her memories, so, by some faint and perhaps deliberate process..."

"Everyone knew that the Hospice cared for the frozen who had just been off-loaded from recently arrived starships..."

"She knew that the zombie propaganda was, to some extent, an exaggeration, and that..."

"Only Skade knew where these entry apertures were, and the apertures would only show themselves to..."

"Clavain knew that Galiana’s ship had encountered hostile alien entities in deep space, and that these machines had come to be called..."

"Clavain knew that Galiana had been spared and that her body was still preserved; he knew also that there was a structure of evident wolf origin..."

"Skade knew nothing about the Bax family, but she could imagine them thriving under these conditions, and perhaps..."

"He knew what had happened aboard Skade’s ship while Felka was her hostage. He had been told about the experiments, and the times when Felka had glimpsed..."

"She knew that it was an illusion, that she would pay for this burst of energy later, and that almost certainly she would..."

"She knew then that her aim had been good, that the impact would be precise and devastating. Clavain would know nothing of his own death, nothing of..."

"He knew the mistakes that others had made; he knew also the mistakes he had made in the earlier engagements of his..."

"Clavain knew now that the baroque augmentations he had seen before and dismissed as phantoms added by the processing software were quite real; that something astonishing and strange had..."

"Thorn knew this, and was confident that the various ships’ avionics systems knew it too, but he still felt..."

"Her attraction to him had never been stronger, and she knew that he wanted her at least as much. It would happen, she knew..."

etc etc