Considering how quickly wealth and power concentrated in a few hands in the ancient Sparta that despised business dealings, it seems that even greater disparities would quickly manifest in this new commercial version. The fact that they do not seems more the product of auctorial optimism than realistic economics. And Pournelle and Stirling are, despite the basic melodrama of the plot, striving to be realistic. Each chapter of this novel opens with a dry quotation from some real or imagined academic text. Exposition dominates the narrative of this novel like an angry Hessian.
Some passages are little more than desiccated infodumps that run for pages.
And there is really little else in the book to alleviate this. And the plot and its numerous characters are so undistinguished that they just magnify the banality of the whole. Other than that the reader is left to face tiresome padding that drags the book out for far too long. Only the most devoted fans of these authors or this sub-genre will want to suffer through this workmanlike and didactic novel. For there is a tone of political admonishment running throughout this entire series.