Last time I read this, the biology didn’t make sense to me. But I had become determined to understand it, so this time I “got” it and it made the book much better. I will start the next book soon.

An interesting concept, but poorly executed. There were way too many characters, none of whom were adequately developed, and too many throwaway subplots. The characters’ motivations were more often asserted than explained, the dialogue was weak, and the scenes that were even tangentially related to sex made me cringe. To tie this all up, Bear doesn’t seem to have any gift for working with the language.

The novel would’ve been much better as a novella or perhaps a short story – I find these work much better to convey the crux of most science fiction stories, unless the author has a gift for language or character development as well.

Pretty entertaining. (5/09/04)