electronic resource, 527 pages
English language
Published Dec. 1, 2009 by Orbit.
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.
The characters and worldbuilding, especially, in this book are excellent. However, basically every chapter is some sort of high-stakes battle or chase sequence. For me personally, that eventually got a bit taxing. If you're more into that kind of stuff, I'd heartily recommend it tho.
I guess I expected more… There’s one chapter (the eaters) that you can just skip completly imo. There’s been several times when I just wanted to stop reading (the eater-chapter and gendered stereotypes that continue to exist unchanged in the far future…), but I kept going for some reason and have not been rewarded.
This book had been on my list for a while and I was excited to read it.
The ‘universe’ building was great and it definitely inspires me to read more of the series. The plot of this book wasn’t quite what I expected and at times seemed to drift from the main thread to fill in the timeline. That said it comes together in the end.
