Densely plotted and densely written, this novel does take a bit of getting into, but once you do it's a spectacular hard sf space opera. The scope of the noevl is massive, to put it mildly, but the major characters are well developed enough to keep you engrossed in their very human ambitions and defeats. It's an utterly stunning book and one that, if nothing else, will leave you with a mindbending appreciation of just how strange and vast the universe can be.