This was an influential novel at the time it came out for the ideas it advanced and the huge contours on which it painted its story. For much of it, the focus is split between the galactic view of a Blight that threatened enormous stretches of space reaching down from the Transcend and the one planet where a family fleeing the Blight landed on a planet of non-spacefaring sophonts, soon reduced to only two children unaware of the secret their cargo vessel was carrying. In the middle section of the novel there is a slow motion voyage to bring the two plotlines together and at the end an action section to show how both groups manage to solve the desperate situations in which they were enmeshed. This is a book with big ambitions which influenced other authors to produced their own big concept books.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding in the space opera sections, but found the planet-based portions less compelling. The level of emotional investment I had with the characters was only just enough to pull me through the whole book, however, and I'm afraid that the big climax was for me marred by plot and character elements I disliked. The resolution at the very end, with the surviving High Beyond characters stranded on the planet, is something hard for me to accept as having solved all their issues in a satisfying way, despite the author's best efforts to tell me otherwise. He mentions the enormous side effects of the way the magical technological solution reshaped the nature of a large section of the galaxy and I wondered whether the probably suffering of any advanced inhabitants of those places was being soft-pedaled. So while I admire the profusion of new ideas found here, these cracks in the storytelling bothered me enough to keep from giving it a top rating.

I listened to the interesting sections at 1.5X speed in my audiobook and the other sections at 2X. I am glad I made it to the end but I do not plan to read the other books in the series.