I've read about half of this. It is a rambling epic of history from ancient Phoenicia to a distant star-faring future, told in a stuttering series of short stories -- many have characters in common, but since they are always of necessity changing their identities, it takes a little while to recognise them anew in each episode. The theme is a grand one and the stories clever, but this will never be a classic like Anderson's great -- and *concise* -- novels The Great Crusade and Tau Zero.

While most of the writing is pretty good, there's at least one chapter where the choice of archaic language really grates ("Where is thee from?" -- I doubt anyone, even Ohio Quakers, ever actually spoke like this, but even if they did, Anderson and his editors ought to know better than to irritate the reader so!) and it's kind of annoying to realise how derivative the theme is of Robert Heinlein's Howard Families series (Time Enough For Love and its prequels and sequels).

I'm almost embarrassed to be putting this in the Quality SF bookbag, but it's not really bad -- just not as good as I'd hoped.

P.S. Now finished -- assessment remains the same. The only other groaner is the explicit accusation (directed at the senior protagonist after a libertarian political rant) by a cameo character of "plagiarising Heinlein". Gah. The theory of interstellar exploration proposed at the end -- that most civilisations become introverted with age on the home planet, the only explorers and settlers of the far reaches of the universe will be that misfits and throwbacks -- is plausible but not very well supported.

This is a prime example of Grumpy Old Bastard writing, which Heinlein did much better indeed :-)