On Earth, Chairman Basil Wenceslas, the power behind the ostensible rulers of the Terran Hanseatic League, King Peter and Queen Estarra, continues to try to hang on to his perks in the face of a series of very public defeats at the hands of the hydrogues, the gas-giant dwellers determined to exterminate humanity, and at the hands of the Klickiss-contaminated robot soldiers of his own forces. But his old sureness of command is failing, and he seems doomed to go under—unless he can assassinate the king and pregnant queen. But these two are proving themselves to be newly adept at playing the Machiavellian game.

Jess Tamblyn, having been transformed into something more than human by merger with the watery aliens known as wentals, uses the same process to rescue his dying lover, Cesca Peroni. Together, the two are insuring that cargos of wentals get delivered to all the gas-giant worlds, where these potent allies of humanity will help against the hydrogues.

On Ildira, home to the aliens who uplifted humanity some two centuries ago, Mage-Imperator Jora'h faces a dilemma: betray his human friends, or let the hydrogues destroy Ildira? Suspecting that an answer to his problems lies in archives 10 millennia old, he dispatches a human and some Ildirans to Hyrillka to search for answers. But meanwhile, the psionically powerful Osira'h, the hybrid daughter he engendered with a human woman named Nira, might hold a solution closer to home. (Also, Jora'h is in for a surprising reunion with Nira, whom he long thought dead.)

On the planet Theroc, where a sentient world-forest is struggling to recover from a near-apocalypse, a transfigured human named Beneto is teaching the planet to produce living battle cruisers made out of wood!

Elsewhere, the Roamers—space gypsies responsible for providing all the starflight fuel in the galaxy—are busy learning how to survive under the new galactic paradigm. A little invention by Roamer Kotto Okiah, called a "doorbell," which can shatter the diamond-hulled ships of the hydrogues, might just help!

Asimov and Herbert haunt these pages

To get my evaluation of the pure storytelling aspects out of the way succinctly and up front: Anderson continues his almost arcanely competent juggling of scenes, peoples and events to exactly the same degree as in the first four books. Seeds planted thousands of pages ago come to fruition; consistency of character depiction is maintained, with some new emotional developments; and climaxes are reached, culminating in startling new cliffhangers by novel's end. (The next book arrives a year from now, so sit tight.) The beloved old tropes involving vast stretches of time and space, bizarre alien behavior, human transcendence and super-science gosh-wowerie are expertly plucked. Fans of Herbert, Asimov and Doc Smith will find similar frissons here.

But it's taken me this long to discover why I can't get more enthusiastic about this series than its "Gentleman B" rating, nor be able to nominate it as a classic. The fault lies in two areas: structure and texture.

The bite-sized pieces of which this series is constructed, alternating in leap-frog fashion from one point of view to another, insure that there can never be any grand sweeps of action, any majestic rhythms of narrative. Each piece—even important chapters such as Chapter 3 ("Jora'h would begin the most important conversation in Ildiran history ...") or Chapter 121, where Osira'h achieves the impossible—is functionally and semantically equivalent to every other chapter. True, sometimes Anderson will get some momentum going by alternating chapters between people in proximity to the same events, thus maintaining linearity, but even these feel abortive. The tricks of pacing that fiction has laboriously worked out over centuries are discarded for a steady tromp-tromp-tromp through the plot.

An equal deficiency is the lack of texture of this future. With Herbert, say, one could practically reach out and touch a Fremen, or smell the spice of Arrakis. Here, Anderson does not deliver a vivid picture of the thousand-and-one mundane touchstones we need to build a mental world. What do the dinner plates look like at the banquet where Chairman Wenceslas is nearly assassinated? You'll never know—until the set designer does the movie version. Out of all the thousands of pages in this series, where plot is the real dictator, surely some words could have been spared to create the surfaces we would love—and need—to touch.