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It's been fifteen hundred years since The Quiet War, and the evening's empires, as Bob Dylan put it, "have returned into sand." The once solar-system encompassing civilization has fractured and decayed, leaving a multitude of smaller communities living amongst the ruins. Gajananvihari Pilot, better known as Hari, and his family are scavengers, roaming the system for salvaged technology and supplies. It's a pretty good life until their ship is attacked and stolen, leaving Hari, marooned, as the only known survivor.

Hari is left with a thirst for revenge and the need to find out who did it and why. He's also got one item salvaged from his escape, the head of Dr. Gagarian, an eccentric researcher who was a passenger on Pabuji's Gift. The head, it turns out, contains technology that a lot of people would like to get their hands on.

Hari's quest leads him from the outer reaches of the solar system to the inner asteroid belt, eventually all the way to Earth. In the process, he meets lost relatives, finds unlikely allies and friends, confronts unexpected enemies, and grows up.

That's plenty of story for any novel, and Paul McAuley places it in a setting that is both decaying, and, from our perspective, full of wonders. For the characters, life in the solar system is akin to Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, with pockets of civilization and relative prosperity separated by lengthy and dangerous travel. It's a far cry from the beginnings of a solar system wide civilization depicted in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and from the cultural struggles going on in distant Fomalhaut in In The Mouth of the Whale, yet McAuley provides enough of an historical background to tie them all together. The life of genetic engineer Sri Hong-Owen is one of the connecting threads in the novels and, in a way, influences every character in Evening's Empires, though it is separated from the other novels by vast distances in time and space.

The novels are also connected in their depictions of societies in a state of flux, where the possibility of sudden and violent change looms large, and the desire to confront past wrongs often leads to new, and bigger, problems. Hari's adventure in Evening's Empires recapitulates the themes of the entire series on a personal level, to the extent that his motivations lead him to places that he couldn't have expected, but now can no longer avoid. And that's not all bad.

One final note for the meta-readers among us. The sections of Evening's Empires are titled after science fictions of the past, such as "Childhood's End" and "Marooned Off Vesta." Have fun deciding just how much each section does, and does not resemble and/or pay tribute to its famous predecessor.

Reviewer Greg L Johnson is wondering what the True Empire has ever done for us. Greg's reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune to the The New York Review of Science Fiction.