It is very much a setup for the series, which will either appeal to you or not but it appears to have been serialized in initial publication, so it makes total sense to me. Plus I am consuming the entire series via audible anyways. And each instalment is pretty short, so I doubt it overstays it’s welcome for anyone. The narration is pretty strong, thankfully! He does a good job of differentiating between characters and inflection seems on point. Not the best performance but when you listen to ad many audiobooks as I do, I find this narration much better than average. It’s short enough, clips along fairly well pacing wise, and changes up worldbuilding from show and tell, which I personally don’t mind but may grate on the reader who prefers “show” and hates infodumps. Decent prose and I’m just in the mood for this kind of old sci-fi—and it does feel very much like older sci-fi for better and worse. There won’t be anything here that will blow you away or feel innovative if you’ve read current sci-fi. But it does feel distinctive from Dune, where I wasn’t sure if it would or not. It’s more concerned with the cultural underpinnings of the various races and seeing where those drives take them, and the intrigue around that—then the scheming political and philosophy of Dune. I myself go back to Dune for my interest in culture/religion/philosophy, so I find these books pretty different (and overall prefer the Dune books) but I feel like that distinction might let other readers decide if they’d give this a go if they did not like Dune and were worried this was too similar.