At around a thousand pages this was a big book, but despite some embarrassingly bad dialogue and a lot of overly-horny people it was a pretty good reading experience.
I often talk about world -building – this book ups the scale quite a bit to universe building, and does a fantastic job introducing us to a wide and diverse bunch of planets. Part of the reason the book is so long is that the author really takes the time to sketch out the details of each place, to understand how it fits into the Commonwealth of planets that form the background for the story. It takes a lot of imagination to come up with a whole planet and biome, let alone 20 or 30 of them.
The science fiction here fits the definition of epic – I really loved how it zooms in and out of different places and situations. Some scenes were thrilling – for example the attack of the Alamo Avengers on the shipbuilding facility. It played off like an action scene out of a heist movie – so good.
I touched on the dialogue being on the corny side – although this wasn’t all the way through the book. Some characters just sounded bad. Ozzie, who had a truly boring point of view thread going through the whole book was particularly awful. His POV was the one that I ended up skimming as I did not really care about what he was up to – and I am still not sure what it contributed to the overall plot of the book.
Unfortunately the book ends on a cliffhanger, and I would have liked a little bit more resolution before we have to dive into another thousand page novel. One little hint inside this book seems to telegraph the downfall of the alien villains – I would have liked that to be a little more subtle, but I don’t know the actual ending yet so I can’t tell if I am right or not.
Speaking of the aliens, the (rather long) point of view chapter of the development of the alien race on the Dyson planet was really interesting. The writer really handled that well and I would like to read more like this – it reminded me of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s writing on spider development in Children of Time.
So, great book with a few reservations. I need to take a little break from the genre but I want to come back to this before I forget all the details. A few more books and I’ll come back to read the sequel.
Next I am reading Flashlight by Susan Choi.
