Some background: I move a lot of product for a living, so a book that’s basically a logistics operation with a plot wrapped around it was never going to scare me off on page count alone. This thing is over 1200 pages in the American hardcover, and some editions split it clean in half into two separate books, which tells you something about how much Hamilton’s asking of you before the story’s even done setting up.
And it is a lot of setup. Two branches of humanity, the Adamists running things more or less like us and the Edenists wired into living biotech ships and habitats through a shared telepathic sense, spread across a couple hundred colonized systems, and Hamilton wants you to understand the whole architecture before he lets the actual crisis start, which is the dead coming back and possessing the living. That’s a hell of a premise once it kicks in around the quarter mark, and once it kicks in the book stops feeling like homework.
Where I’ll push back some: there’s a lot of description in here that doesn’t move anything, whole passages cataloging a planet’s ecology or a starship’s drive specs that read like a shipping manifest nobody needed itemized that thoroughly. I don’t mind detail, I catalog freight for a living, but even I found myself skimming a few of the slower stretches waiting for a character I actually cared about to reenter the scene.
Where it earns the length: once the possession plague starts spreading, the scale pays off. You’ve got a genuine sense of an entire interstellar civilization under threat because Hamilton spent three hundred pages proving to you it’s real and it’s big. Renata gave up around the halfway point, said the sex scenes felt tacked on and the cast was too sprawling to track. Fair complaint. I stuck it out and I’m glad I did, though I went in knowing this is book one of three and closed it with zero resolution, just a much bigger problem than I started with.
Recommend it if you’ve got the patience for the freight before you get the payload.