But, even after converting the ship into a luxury cruiser, capable of carrying millions of people of different alien races, the humans don't know all the ship's secrets. When senior members of the human crew are sent to investigate one of those mysteries, namely what lies at the heart of the ship, it leads to a five thousand year epic adventure. Not content with playing with his glorious ship, Reed decides to make his human characters immortal, all the better to people his epic story. Marrow , the place at the centre of the ship, is an unrelentingly harsh environment, where characters are tested to destruction, though many are then resurrected, their bodies rebuilt. The people that return from that adventure are very different folk indeed.
Marrow is an ambitious book, full of vast imaginings, and it has a relentless pace.
It is also flawed. Reed's immortal humans seem to hang in a timelessness built on duty and little else. It gives the characters a soul-lessness, an inhumanity that left this reader cold towards them and their fate. An interesting work, but rather arid.