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I love the super-technical approach in this book. There is a rich combination of hard-core chemistry, biology, particle physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics; and that is on top of technologies like super-computing, artificial intelligence and bio-engineering. The first section on the pre-birth development of Yatima is mind-blowing; bio-engineering, psycho-engineering, just a wealth of concepts that left me breathless.

There are three types of "people" in the story. There are regular human beings--sort of like Luddites. There are robots that run on artificial intelligence. And there are "polises", that are pure personalities that are run on super-computers. Most of the story is about the polises, who are super-intelligent spirits (?) that drop mind seeds with clones of themselves onto various planets.

The drama starts when an astronomer notices that the rotation rate of nearby double neutron star system starts to slow down. The slow-down is much more rapid than could be expected from known physics. When the neutron star system comes to a stop, an intense cosmic ray shower is expected to disrupt life on Earth.

And then, things start to get really weird. Infinite dimensions. Infinite universes. I'm not sure exactly what a "character" in the book really is. "People" just aren't what they used to be. And I can't figure out how characters/clones get from one star system to another, from one set of dimensions to another set, or from one universe to the next. As Yogi Berra said, "The future isn't what it used to be."