Great read, Poul anderson really gets you involved with the characters. I enjoyed this book very much, if you like sci-fi and technology you will love it...

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too many words and a weird final act
My biggest beef with this book is that it is too big. The prose is painstaking in its detail. Conversations among the players are overlong and too smart for their own good. They plan for every foreseeable contingency down to the grittiest detail; meanwhile, the reader is lost because he can't see the forrest through the trees! It's irritating because not only does it slow down the plot but renders much of that reading a waste of time. Then Anderson unleashes a surprise at the end of Part II that completely changes the game. Which brings me to my second beef...

Part III. This part of the book is completely out of step with the rest of the novel. It seems to me that Anderson intended to end the book after Part II, but once he got there he wasn't satisfied, so he wrote 150 pages more. Several hundred years elapse, whereas the events in the first two acts take place over a month or thereabouts. Halfway through this false ending I had completely lost interest. The plot also takes a couple of fantastic turns that stretch science fiction to science farce.

Lastly, the book is a difficult read. The following sentence is indicative of the flowery narration sustained over the hulking 530 pages: "Turbulence eddied from each of the bodies and bodies and bodies that hurried, dodged, dawdled, gestured, swerved, lingered. Colors and faces lost meaning in their swarm. The air was thick with their breath, harsh with their footfalls and voices. Wind drove clouds like smoke across the strips of sky between walls."

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I just could not get into this book. By page 100, I still didn't have any connection to the characters or the world, and was not engaged in any way.
So I stopped, and re-posted. I just don't get where the author was trying to go with this book.

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