I found this the weakest of the four books in the generally impressive Testament series, mainly because the technobabble that is a minor irritant in Vol. 1 picks up in intensity, to the point of actually being quite distracting. Some of it's just that a little mysteriousness is just fine, especially in a book based on religious scriptures (some of the tech reminded me of midichlorians...), and some of it's that the specific things the tech was given credit for just don't make sense. I suppose I was hypersensitive to it because what Alan Stern is depicting as trying to do at the start is more or less the grotesque version of what my PhD was going to be all about, as perceived by people who don't understand the work and fear things they don't understand....