I liked this book a lot.

The author does a good job jumping between three different stories which all have different feels. The world is vibrant, and is shown, not told, so there's all sorts of little mysteries constantly being resolved as you figure out how this world works. There's some pretty interesting stuff in here about history, in two senses. One, history as a sequence of events that have consequences in the present and into the future. And two, history as a received record and its influence on society and individuals. There's a lot of stuff about colonialism, slavery, etc., also, which is not particularly subtle but not distractingly heavy-handed either.

It's not particularly spoiler-y to mention that this book deals with 'how a society works when sometimes, unpredictably, everything goes very bad and the species' survival is at stake'. Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem has a similar theme, though this book spends a lot more time on it. So you spend a lot of time in this weird society which bears a lot of resemblance to our own, but also has a lot of contortions because of the aforementioned threat of doom. And I guess the central conflict of this book is how to fix this society, or alternate ways of living under this threat. Blah blah, in some sense this all applies to real life, how will we real humans adjust in response to great shocks, this book helps us think about such questions.