Wow! Don't even THINK of reading this book unless you consider yourself a solid fan of HARD sf. Some high-school or college physics or astrophysics and a LOT of reading since then would be good too. This is chewy stuff.

Sub-atomic physics (as of 1997), virtual bodies, wormholes, cloning, a time-scale that is mostly in hundreds then thousands of years and then just gets silly .... multiple universes, deaths of galaxies ... this makes Olaf Stapledon look like a sissy.

And yet there are some reasonably believable characters tying all this together.

I enjoyed it, but perhaps I won't rush to read all of Egan's other novels. I have a bunch of his short stories queued up, and I understand he's very, very good at that, so I'll go there next.