Last book in the saga, so now I can say a few things on its whole. I'll split my rant in two parts: story and writing.

This is the hardest sci-fi you can find, something Arthur C. Clarke would have loved to write. There's particle accelerators, relativity, and some wild speculations on the future developments of theoretical physics. All this crammed in one of the best stories I've had the pleasure to read. And when I say "story", I'm not talking about the tales of a handful of characters. I'm talking about the story of the whole cosmos. So, story-wide this saga is a full. solid 5 stars.

And now comes the downside. Writing style is really really flat and unappealing. Characters are monodimensional (never an adjective was better chosen), I could hardly tell them apart. This is probably somehow inevitable when you tell a story of such magnitude than spans over loooooong periods of time, but still. I feel like something better could (should) have been done. So, writing style is a 3. Total average: 4 stars. Shame, because I really feel this saga should be up there together with the timeless sci-fi classics, but it falls just a little bit short.