The final and shortest part of the book is told only from the third person and lets us see the Uplands some 30 years after the cessation of the war through the eyes of Gradisil's two sons. It directly raises the issue of justice versus revenge for Gradisil's death after the war. The arc from Klara's actions in part one to steps taken by Gradisil to help forge a nation to a trial in the third part that invokes a similar setting before Athenian citizens in Oresteia clearly evidences the influence of the Greek myth on the book.

Although this is, at bottom, a tale of nation-building, it is not told with great, broad strokes like most space opera. Rather, this is character-driven fiction, a story told entirely from the standpoint of a handful of individuals. That may also be part of the problem with the book. There is no hard and fast rule that the fictional characters, particularly mythic ones, need be moral, heroic or even likable. Yet it is hard to care whether the Uplands survive when none of the people telling the story is particularly likable and the nation seems constructed as much on dislike of the story's bad guy as the interests of the good citizens of the town. Undoubtedly, some western movies utilized just such an approach. But when characters must drive virtually the entire story, film and video do not require as much as the printed word - well more than 500 pages of it here - to keep the audience invested in the characters telling the story.

Some of the science may raise the hackles of readers who pay attention to such things (particularly the outcome of what seems to be one of the longest death scenes in years). Roberts also uses some rather annoying devices to apparently reflect cultural change. For example, beginning in the second part of the story the letter "c" is dropped from words that contain "ck." At first you think these (and at least two similar devices in the book) are typos but even once you realize it is intentional, the brain stumbles over words it says are misspelled.

Despite these and other flaws, Gradisil is an interesting variation of the space opera of today. Roberts plainly utilizes some of the American western themes that inspired the subgenre decades ago. Yet by melding elements of Greek myth and contemporary politics, this is a space opera of a near-future Earth, not one writ on an intergalactic scale.