This is the fourth novel from Alastair Reynolds that I have read, and the third in his trilogy that began with Revelation Space. This novel is by far the best he’s written, and it brings to fruition a lot of the ideas that he’s been working with in his previous novels. The story is complex, and the scope is quite vast with lots of “Big Ideas strewn like pebbles on a beach” according to the Publishers Weekly review, and unlike a lot of hard sci-fi, the story is largely character-driven, and the Reynolds choice of protagonists are surprising and insightful. Like his previous novels (and perhaps like the lighthugger starships in his books), the plotting takes a long time to build up to speed, but once things get going this becomes a novel that is quite impossible to put down.

Reynolds is writing some of the best “hard SF space opera” out there.