This novel tells an amazing story. I really would have liked to give it a better rating than I did. Unfortunately the novel comes across more like two books smashed together. First 2/3 or so of the novel is a disaster epic set roughly in the modern day. This portion is the novel's strongest, though it does suffer from excessive amounts of info-dumping. While the remainder of the novel is set ~5,000 years later and is a weird anthropology/political thriller This portion might have worked better as a separate book and fleshed out a bit more.