text: Not normally a hard-core sci-fi reader, but the book description and reviews caught my attention. Initially, I had doubts about the non-human narrative, but that actually became more interesting over the course of the next 200 pages. The idea of the story covering millennia was also cool...until it wasn’t. The story begins to lag badly about 60% in, and the human characters seem to be living variations of the same scenario without really adapting or learning from their previous mistakes. Maybe there’s a point there, but it eventually got tiresome. If edited down by a third, I think I could have enjoyed this more, but by the last part, I just wanted it to end, with no feelings of investment for how that happened.