Unfortunately, by 2/3 through, it was more than obvious that nothing important was going to be resolved in this book. It was basically just a preface to some other story. Additionally, there had been so much dilution of the main character group with more characters that I was losing track - and interest - of the original characters. By the end of the book, I was only still really interested in and sympathetic to one of the original characters.
It was a reasonably interesting book, and I enjoyed the word portraits, the conceits of fantasy, and some of the links of science. I just wish that she'd kept a tighter hold of her characters, or made me care more about them being scattered to heck-n-gone by the end of the story.