This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
So Amazon had been recommending this to me strongly for months, and I finally decided to try it. It starts out very slowly; intercutting between multiple viewpoints in all of which some development is gradually taking place.
Eventually the threads come together, and it becomes more compelling. Most of the rest of the book is good solid ultratech hard SF, with a certain amount of nanotechnology, odd cultural shards, mysterious weapons, huge starships cutting through the void crewed by odd and variously engineered humans, and so on. Memorable ideas and a certain amount of mind-stretching; just what one wants.
The ending was, at least on the surface, all too neat, and strikingly deus ex machina, on the order of "and then the evil dragon hurled our heros into the Pit of Doom; but fortunately the Pit of Doom turned out to open into paradise, and they all lived happily ever after". There are other books set in this universe, though, and maybe some of them will make that ending read a little less contrived in retrospect (not that that's necessarily a good excuse).
This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.