As before, Anderson provides a very concise and readable summary up front of the main plot threads to date, a summary that, along with the glossary of names and places at the book's back, should allow an easy re-familiarity with the continuity.

What are the major developments in this penultimate installment?

The ancient insectoid race known as the Klikiss, once thought to be extinct, have re-manifested as unstoppable killing machines and conquerors. Their first major beachhead is the human-colonized planet Llaro, where they gird and fortify themselves for reclamation of their old empire—and the destruction of their old servants, the evil and rebellious Klikiss robots—robots who have previously betrayed humanity.

Meanwhile, the Hansa League centered on Earth is foundering. King Peter and Queen Estarra, the figurehead puppets manipulated by Chairman Wenceslas, have matured, rebelled and fled to the planet Theroc, where they are assembling the Confederation, a rival to the Hansa. Naturally, Wenceslas has brutal plans to prevent this.

Sirix, the leader of the Klikiss robots, is startled by the reappearance of his ancient masters and interrupts his plans for galactic domination to go on a killing spree against the big bugs. But his overconfidence leads to some unexpected defeats.

Humanity's on-again, off-again alien allies, the ldirans, have their own problems. A mad traitor, Rusa'h, has become a more-than-mortal being, thanks to the fiery elementals the faeroes, who inhabit suns. He's determined to overthrow the legitimate Ildiran rulers and take their place.

Interspersed among these large events, scores of average humans seek new ways to live, love, communicate, fight and survive.

Adventure with an old-fashioned flavor

Really, this next-to-last volume of Anderson's sweeping "winds of war"-style space opera cannot be separated or distinguished from its predecessors: All the vices and virtues of the earlier books are carried forward in imperturbable measure. But this very fact itself causes a slight diminution in the latest book's grade, since at this stage one would hope for a kind of summing-up or accelerando or intensification of pitch. But no, it's just more of what has come before, with a few new deaths, a few more destroyed planets and seesaw shifts in power structures and planetary interelations.

To see what makes this long serial only a lukewarm bath, consider the original six books of the Dune series that Frank Herbert finished before his death. The arc of that series was jam-packed and extensive in time. Characters appeared, grew, vanished.

In Anderson's milieu, the initial states of the protagonists remain essentially static. This might be due to the compressed realtime of the books. I've lost track exactly, but I'd hazard that the events here have spanned about two to five years so far. That's roughly 2,500 pages devoted to 60 months of action, tops—or 40 pages per month. I couldn't even write 40 pages about a month of my own life at its most hectic period!

Be that as it may. Anderson is dealing with a broad canvas. But it's way too familiar by now, and such slim new conceits as the Klikiss culture (they're basically unknowable to humans) and the hybrid yoking of Ildiran and Therocan mental powers just don't serve to jazz up this prolonged soap/space opera, which is actually starting to feel more like stuff by Edmond Hamilton/John W. Campbell (wearing his 1930s author hat) than van Vogt/Asimov/Herbert.

Anderson is going to have to pull some major rabbits out of his hat in the final volume to justify all this wordage.