I finished the trilogy a few weeks ago and I'm just now recovering from the shock. This series is mind-blowing and it makes Dune seem like a children's book in comparison. Hard sci-fi is not easy to do. If you're a fan of the genre, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It's fairly harrowing though. I will never look at the stars the same way again...and I'm not sure we should be trying to contact alien life...