content: This is the story of a spaceship that travels through space for no discernible reason. It has a ruling class and a huge cathedral, a powerful Bishop and a hereditary captain. The latter is advised by the narrator of the story, a man born deformed who wears visible prosthesis. At some point, the ship encounters an alien vessel, and the last part of the book is taken up with efforts to explore the vessel... I won't spoil it for you.The book builds up a bit of suspense but in the end the let down is palpable: this is a book where nothing is explained. Instead the author relies on vagueness to build up suspense; on intimations, partial indications, incomplete answers. This would be fine if there was some kind of payout at the end of the tunnel, but there ain't one folks. As for the ending, I think the past decades since the book was written have not worn well on it because it just made me want to shrug and say, yeah, so?