This took me quite a while to finish, a massive 1,2k pages tome. But once again a brilliant space opera by Peter F. Hamilton. A large amount of fantastic world building and set up for the whole trilogy, which leads to a rather slow start. I'm just glad I started Hamilton with the Commonwealth Saga and not this series. Not knowing about his writing style could have made me put down the book half way through and I would have missed a great series. A lot of reviews I read say that this is Peter F. Hamilton's best work and better than the Commonwealth series. For me it's just the opposite. For example only a few characters of this enormous cast worked for me and they had a hard time to develop because of their rather short "screen time"(what's the equivalent in a book???). Their plot lines are in parts hundreds of pages apart, so you have to think hard about what happened there last. Another problem of the character development is in my opinion the narrator choice. Third-person omniscient just doesn't work for me and was rightfully ousted as the go to narrator for fiction novels. Overall still a great story, you can overlook the little flaws and still enjoy it. I would say Peter F. Hamilton later identified the weaknesses of his story telling and applied the changes in his later works.