A good finale. Hits all the right notes, closes all the story arcs. There's even a nice Epilogue at the end.

What I liked: The ever-present feeling of nostalgia with the characters and the reader. "That's it, this is the last one". I appreciated the Goths being explained (and more importantly why they're angry), but not so much that it became stupid mumbo-jumbo. Duarte waking up was an unexpected surprise, but fits with his character.

I especially liked having Tanaka as a viewpoint - it was hard to get right, and the authors did well. The book still felt like a "last session of a decade-long RPG", and that was wonderful. There's even a point in the book where Amos asks Holden if this was going to be a "one-shot".

Also, "Dogs in Space" need to be more common in SFF. I really liked Amos' character arc where he finds his moral compass again - guess living with Holden has to rub off.

It also evokes the right feeling of "scale" - "this is beyond us - but we have to try anyway", as Elvi would probably put it. It almost felt like a allegory for Climate change to me at times.

The Bad: The book makes a pacing decision to repeat the last part of a scene when dealing with multiple PoVs, and it didn't work well for me, especially towards the end of the book. It's nice to see the same scene from different PoVs, but repeated usage made the pacing feel off.

The Okay: The Ending. There was no way any ending could have worked perfectly here, but I felt that 30/1300 fully baked planets was a bit of a harsh choice.