I've enjoyed several of this author's stories. This particular one, not so much. It's like the book has been created using scraps of various standard tropes, a patchwork of stuff that's been done so many times before. The imagery is weak. Also... the paradigm of Anglo-centric writing styles in sci-fi is getting very tiresome. It's like we took the London culture and expanded it to fit a universe... double yawn. This particular novel just dragged a bit overall.

Really enjoyed this one! The world building is great and the action is great.

The word choice is so consistently poor. I was constantly rereading sentences and even then I had to infer meaning too often. It’s almost like it was translated from a different language. It’s virtually unreadable. Would be fine as a freebie series starter, I guess?

The book is quite a disaster yarn that stretches 5000 years. I appreciated some of the tech detail and the jargon, but it got to be too much in sections of long drawn out prose. (Spoiler Alert) I also found the notion that 7 billion souls on earth handed a Death Sentence would blithely cooperate in saving a few thousand. And, also, that those few thousand would leave Loved Ones behind with barely a few thoughts.

Beginning to like Tchaikovsky more. Looking forward to the next volume.

Although many aspects of the story brought to mind ‘The Expanse’ series, or maybe because of that, I found this book hard to put down. It’s sort of ‘the Expanse’ written in a parallel universe. Despite being an arachnophobe, I’ve enjoyed pretty much every book AT has written and recommend this along with his other stories.