In the story, the human and alien Ildiran civilizations have barely recovered from the universe-spanning elemental war chronicled in The Saga of Seven Suns, and now a new threat to their existence appears.

He called the book "my longest novel so far", and noted that the sequel series "has been building inside my imagination for many years, and it was like a hunting dog straining at the leash, ready to be released."

Peace and commerce have been restored, with the Roamers back in the business of mining and selling the valuable stardrive fuel ekti (required for faster-than-light travel) and the green priests of Theroc providing instantaneous trans-galactic communication via their sentient worldtrees.

But the malevolent Klikiss robots are plotting their revenge from exile, and soon find an ally in the ancient Shana Rei, the destructive personification of darkness and chaos which has awakened from millennia of slumber to destroy all sentient life in the universe.

But the malevolent Klikiss robots are plotting their revenge from exile, and soon find an ally in the ancient Shana Rei, the destructive personification of darkness and chaos which has awakened from millennia of slumber to destroy all sentient life in the universe.

David Pitt of Booklist wrote in his starred review, "Anderson hits it out of the galaxy again: space opera doesn't get much more exciting, or much more richly populated with alien races, technologies, and cultures, than it does in this sprawling, engrossing epic.”[3] However Publishers Weekly stated that "the multitudinous characters offer more variety than depth, the world-building strains for verisimilitude, and the complex plot comes to feel meandering and grandiose," adding that the novel "replicates the original series' flaws.

Narrating in his usual breezy style, and untroubled by scientific fact, Anderson just lays it on with a trowel—and the upshot’s a book that’s so busy communicating everything in general that it forgets to be about something in particular.