I love all the books in this series, but when I got to describe the series to people, of course I mention a lot of stuff from the first book as a spoiler free (mostly) overview of the concepts. But this is the book I always have in mind when I tell people “it builds so well to some excellent, galactic level threat kind of story telling”. When I think about the moments in the books that affect me most, this is 7/10 of what I think about.