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Kim Stanley Robinson builds a solar system here with a density most science fiction doesn’t attempt, cities on rails circling Mercury to stay ahead of the sunrise, terraformed asteroids, a fully worked-out logic for how humanity spreads itself across every rock worth living on. That worldbuilding and the gender-inclusive way the book treats its characters, several of them intersex or otherwise outside the usual binary defaults, are genuinely ahead of a lot of what else was being published around the same time.

Where I struggled is pacing. There’s a travelogue thread and a conspiracy thread running in parallel, and for long stretches they didn’t feel like they were actually talking to each other, the plot momentum kept getting interrupted by pages of pure description that moved the setting forward more than they moved the story. I don’t think that’s automatically a flaw, some readers clearly love that texture, but it made the book feel longer than its page count in a way I noticed most in the middle third.

The characters were the other soft spot for me, I never fully connected with any of them the way the ideas around them deserved, there’s a slight distance the prose keeps from its own people that I couldn’t quite name a reason for. I finished it admiring the scope more than I enjoyed the read, which is a strange note to land on for a book this ambitious. If you go in already sold on hard science fiction’s slower pleasures, the terraforming chapters alone might be worth the price of admission. I wanted a little more story pulling me through them.