A big fat sprawling space opera taking place over several thousand years, the virtue is to indelibly imprint in a reader (especially maybe a younger reader) that the Fermi Paradox (where is the other intelligent life in the galaxy?) is interesting and well-worth pondering. One direction taken in last couple decades is that maybe that evidence is all around, but the geologic scale and time scale of the traces has been too hard for humans to conceptualize until recently. That is, interstellar intelligent life might be capable of transforming and manipulating parts of the galaxy at both the nano and the planetary scale.
So, provocative ideas. But let us not forget that interstellar intelligent life would likely also write really good novels. And this is not one of them. As Kirkus Review wrote: “Forget such conventional novelistic virtues as characters, linear plotting, or continuous narrative; instead, Baxter offers challenging puzzles and mind-boggling extrapolations in a sweeping yarn that explodes with ideas.” There’s a few ideas, but the characterization of the inner life of the characters is basically zero, and the fixation on distinguishing “Europeans” from “Japanese” and then from “Africans” and insistence on using “race” is off-putting and can only make you wonder about Baxter’s inner life.
Michael Kevane 