There's a really interesting idea at the heart of this - the Thousand Earths, a grouping of flat discs of land, each one slowly dissolving from the edge - but the book doesn't do justice to it. The characters are flat, and the storytelling is very "and then this thing happened, and then this thing" with no real sense of the characters outside of their plot function. It's also interspersed with a second tale which could almost be someone parodying a typical Baxter hero: an American astronaut on a long long voyage, who seems to want nothing more than to find someone to moan at that the future isn't what he expected it to be.