Rounded up to 4 from 3.5, because 3 is a little toooo mean.

This is going to sound weird for a hard-as-diamond hard sf New Space Opera book, but this book could have used a tad more worldbuilding and a hundred pages less plot. I wish we'd SEEN more melting buildings, witnessed more people with implants gone haywire by the Melding Plague, or more of a glimpse of the haywire scenery of the Rust Belt.

But that, I guess, is the upside and the downside of an Alastair Reynolds book. A million crazy far-future ideas scattered like little gems over a sandy desert of getting from plot point to plot point. He so rarely stops and MARVELS at the stuff he wants you to stop and marvel at--and while I get it, I still wish I had more payoff in that regard.

And the plot isn't even bad, it's pretty good--hell, it's an order of magnitude better than Revelation Space itself was, taking us through a coincidence-ridden but gripping tale of chase, revenge, and confused identities, with an EXCELLENT sense of slow, dawning realization. The character arc of our protagonist is interesting and believable, and even his final attempt at redemption is just twisted enough that you know the ugliness of his past isn't going anywhere.

Unlike a lot of readers here, I don't even mind the Grubs, who are sort of a MacGuffin but sugar-coated in creepy body horror and delicious wider-mythology exposition. Like everybody, though, I wish we had gotten to see a lot more of them.

Having read onwards to the even more excellent Redemption Ark, this seems to be about the point when Reynolds figured out how to write a novel and not just a slice of hard SF. Good stuff, though the only thing that will probably stick with me over time are some of the images.