Well - I waiting two years for it, that was a lot of time to build some anticipation. Alastair Reynolds became my favorite Science Fiction author somewhere along the line of 6 or 7 years ago. I read Revelation Space almost immediately upon its release - and loved it - but at the time it was just one book out of many that I loved. Somewhere along the way, I don't know when, I noticed that I was getting quite a thrill out of all his books. He has that rare gift of exploring some fantastic science fictional thought experiments AND creating compelling characters that I actually care about. 
 That is a big deal to me, should be to most genre fans. His consistency in putting out quality stories time and time and again have endeared him to me like no other author in the last 20 years. 
 I've known about this novel for a while, it's the first of a trilogy of books to cover the future history of humanity for the next 20 or 30 thousand years, I think. Sounds great to me. I'm signed up and ready to go. 
 The first book in this trilogy is about the relatively near future (say, 150 years, give or take) and I kept reading page after page, waiting for something to happen. It took a VERY long time to get a sense of what the plot of this novel was. At its heart, this novel is a a mystery. A brother and sister that have to uncover the clues left behind by their reclusive and enigmatic grandmother after she passes away and embroil themselves deeper and deeper into a world changing discovery that has the major powers of the solar system falling all over themselves in the race to discover what's happening first. 
 Sounds cool, and it is. I liked the book. However, it reads like one part travelogue, one part mystery, one part sci fi novel. With a lot of the travelogue. Too much. 
 I enjoyed several of Ben Bova's Grand Tour novels, as well as a few other stand along books by authors that spend a great deal of time exploring the planets or moons of the solar system during their tales. Stephen Baxter's Titan and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books come to mind right away. 
 So again, I found myself thinking that this was all ground we've covered before, and the whole chase the grandmother put the grandchildren on seems a bit, well, silly. I wanted more. And I don't mean I wanted the book longer, I wanted more within the pages I already had in front of me. Something was missing. 
 All told, the book does have some revelations at the end, and all the sub-plots get their resolution, I was surprised by a thing or two, so this did hit all the marks. It's a good novel, I loved the concept of the Evolvarium and some of the other technologies and political landscape of the future. 
 If you're a fan you should enjoy it. If you're a newbie to this author I'd recommend some of his other works first, the aforementioned Revelation Space novels, my personal favorite, House of Suns, or even Century Rain or Pushing Ice, all of which were fantastic I thought. 
 This one though, it serves as a great opening to a new universe. But it feels like an opening act. I suspect that this one was played pretty close to the vest by the author, I'm thinking he's saving the mind blowing stuff for the rest of the trilogy.