The series started with a rag-tag crew of spacers in an old space tug just getting by, surviving in the aftermath of the 'Architect war', which was really pretty one sided after all in favor of the 'Architects'-- gigantic sentient beings that arose from 'unspace' to transform planets into a macabre art. The first book had the very interesting set up, where the threat of the 'architects' became clear, the 'Essiel' were introduced and we followed the crew of the 'Vulture God' and came very close to them. Her anger at the Parthenon was addressed in the previous books, but for some reason her entire personality changes to become a genocidal maniac who starts screaming conspiracies for eighty pages, causing a bloody war, and then she REGRETS it in a single sentence. These are the questions Tchaikovsky and his characters grapple with and slowly discover in this final and immensely satisfying conclusion to his trilogy. His books are packed with thought-provoking ideas (as well as lots of spiders; did I mention the spiders?

A. Corey, noting that both works contained "space operatics, down-and-dirty noir and intrigue elements, band-of-comrades adventure, gothic spookiness, alien weirdness, special-effects-go-boom sequences, and mysteries that could well remain mysterious when all is finally wrapped up. But there is always the terrible cost, the loss of billions of lives of those who could not be loaded onto ships quickly enough and, of course, all the complexity of life on the planet about to be destroyed. That “tedious round of politics and violence” occupies much of the novel and reveals how crazily committed to power through war the rest of the world seems to be.

You can be juggling your feelings of hope and fear for your favorite characters and boom, just the most wry and fantastic line that drags an undignified cackle out of you. It is here in the Eye that the Ints – among them, Idris – have been hooked up to machinery that carefully records physical life signs as they delve into unspace.

Only in the final stretch did things really start to get interesting, with the revelation of some of the mind blowing mysteries at the heart of the story.I don't think it's bad, it just became and focused on the wrong things in a series I thought would be character driven and instead was meant to be a huge action series instead. Then there is unspace -- dimensions outside of reality that drive almost everyone insane shortly after entry.