The Nanotech Succession books get stronger with each installment. This final book, and the prequel to the Inverted Frontier (the first two of which I actually read before this) is by far the best. A really inventive, weird, and though provoking book. For a story that spans such stretches of both space and time, it is at its core a story of a small group of travelers learning about each other, and the messed-up shit that has happened to their home and their species.