Fairly short book, and about 3 quarters of it feel like exposition (although there’s plenty of things happening) and build-up, but it covers a lot of ground; a fair amount of it in flashbacks. Nevertheless, it ends in a nice, satisfying climax. It’s fairly unflinching in both its violence and sex (homo- as well as heterosexual).
If you like Morgan’s SF books, you’ll enjoy this as well.

This is gonna be a bit of a rant…

• First off, it’s not as good as Ilium, but it’s still a fast-paced page turner. If you skip all the useless prose.
• It isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Future Fantasy or something. There’s no science (and that’s not just due to the “far future” timeline). Simmon’s an English major FFS.
• He (thinks he)’s well-read, and lets you know it on every single page.
• The story is rather convoluted (probably due to trying to be clever with its literary inspiration) and deus ex machina abound — how couldn’t they in a world full of “gods”? Bah.
• Anything that “creates universes via the thought / inspiration of genius” is made of FAIL. Humans aren’t special, get over it.
• Worst of all, the book is in so many ways incredibly self-centred. By that I mean, that so much of its thinking is a product of the time (and even country of origin as well as possibly religion) of the author.

Still, the Hyperion Cantos (which I enjoyed quite a lot) had similar faults.

As usaul, hard SF-ish. Gives a very good impression of time- and space-implications of galaxy-wide colonisation using relativistic travel. There’s a reveal about two-thirds in (complete with “sit down for this”) which on first thought is a bit “meh!”, but nevertheless has very far-reaching consequences which only become obvious a bit later. Also, I don’t quite see the point of the Palatial side-story. Nevertheless, an enjoyable and gripping read, but not quite as good as Reynolds’ other books IMO.