It's decent. I just find Alastair Reynolds a bad observer of humans though... He paints jarringly bad portaits of humans, e.g., in one of his books he has the mercenaries hand wringing about how they can't be morally shady despite the whole fate of the human race depending on them acting decisively. It's is a really naive depiction of how humans actually act under pressure.

I have similar issues with the Three Body problem.