Although marketed – and sold as – three separate books, this is really one rougly 500 page story split into three. A bit cheeky that – you end up paying, even for the Kindle edition, significantly more than you would if it was sold as what it really is, a single novel.

Still, I’ll forgive the marketing – it’s not as if writers are coining it (average wage £10,000 per annum), so if this gets John Wright a bit more in royalties, I can’t cavil – as the story itself is such a magnificently over the top piece of space opera. For you older SF fans out there: if you thought nothing could top EE Doc Smith’s Lensman stories, think again. To give an idea of the scales involved, Superluminary has War Dysons as one of its minor conceits! Arthur Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic: so it is here. Quantum physics, Aristotelian teleology, and every possible variant on the space-time continuum are employed to give an exhilirating veneer of plausibility to a ride that takes the reader to the galaxy’s core (engineered by Space Vampires as the ultimate weapon) all the way through to galactic ramming. This is SF on a scale so massive that it inspires smiles of awe at Wright’s sheer chutzpah. Can he possibly top this, you ask at the end of Book 1? The answer is, yes.

Now, after the praise, the criticism. Given that the book is quite expensive, the editing on it is far too sloppy. There are far too many typos, incorrect words and word order and sundry other editing errors. It does not look like it has been checked much beyond a spell check. That is sloppy, and takes the reader out of the story quite unnecessarily.

But it’s worth it for the ride.