Wow! What a book! Hugo-Award winning novel.
At first I thought that this was going to have some rather boring passages (all the stuff about the families, especially the Konstantins), but then at the end of the first part (the novel is split into five “books”), I was totally intrigued by the huge conflict that became apparent on the horizon when the negotiators from Earth reveal their secret plan. And from then on, I was hooked, I wanted so badly to know what would happen and this was really the point when all the other pieces fell in place for me and yeah, okay, you have to plough through 150 pages of exposition and wondering what the hell all that was supposed to mean, but that’s okay in a 500-plus pages novel.
All in all, this is cool book and one of the very few times that I actually found a scifi universe that was on par with the Dune universe, if not exactly in terms of overall impact on the genre as such than at least in terms of scale and grandeur, because the universe in Downbelow Station is HUGE, it’s the product of a vastly imaginative mind and I really felt like an explorer myself, trying to imagine where all these places would be located in relation to one another and drawing a map of this galaxy in my mind.
Just a note: this is a LARGE book, definitely not a quick read, 528 pages in a small font, it’s more than twice as long as 1984, the current book of the month.