This is the second Vernor Vinge book I am reading. I enjoyed it more than the first but I still was not wowed. It was, however, an enjoyable and worthwhile read. As Alzaman said, it is a prequel but its relationship with the sequel is just that one character appears in both. He is more likeable and more fully fleshed out here.

The book is driven by 2 main cultural conflicts. Among the space faring humans, there is a culture clash between the democratic, humane, liberal Qeng Ho and the brutal, sadistic, autocratic Emergents. The conflict is plausible and relatable. It also placed constraints on the characters that produced a nice tension in the story. In my review of the first book, I wrote that the antagonist characters had no depth. They were evil because they were evil. This book was better. The bad guys are not bad by their own lights. Their evil can even be rationalized as being necessary for the greater good. It reminded me of this story by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The second conflict was among the aliens. They had a normal political conflict and a cultural one. The cause of the cultural conflict was a voluntary biological adaptation the breaking of which was a quasi-religious taboo. This also made the story interesting. However, it is based on an assumption - that the aliens are like humans - which I discuss in the next paragraph.

One thing I noticed and I liked in both books is the way the author introduces his aliens. He introduces them as people first and then gradually reveals their strangeness. While it makes the characters relatable, it is also anthropomorphic. It is a bit like how families in Disney movies are usually just an idealized American family dressed up as prehistoric people or space people or animals always including a pet that behaves like a dog. It is not a bad technique and it probably makes the story more acceptable. It might also be a human limitation - whatever we imagine is based on what we know, so we might as well go with what we know best.

I disliked 2 things about the book. The first is use of language in a lazy manner. This is something I first noticed in Tipping Point, a TV game show where contestants select which slots in a machine to drop counters. When choosing, the contestants would say "I am going to go for...". Why not just say "I will go for..."? In this book, the author uses the phrase "going to" ad nauseam. I began to dislike it so much that I began mentally replacing it whenever I saw it. The overuse of the phrase made the writing clumsy and so I am surprised that Alzaman compared the book to Gibbon. Because in terms of style, the style of 17th and 18th century authors has a quaint loveliness and gravitas that if done today might seem pretentious. Further, Gibbons' work, though rather judgmental was rather impartial to the characters. Here, the author's bias for or against characters was plain. Finally, in terms of big ideas, I really wasn't impressed with the biggest idea in the book - that of a human empire spanning vast distances. I was more impressed with the alien social structure. They are some sort of spider and the society had gender equality. Unlike books where it seems forced, here it was mentioned in passing and it helped move the story along. The males are the carers for the children. The females were aggressive and seemed to dominate the military. I wonder if this was a subtle nod to Rudyard Kipling's poem The Female of The Species or based on how some spider chicks eat the males after sex.

The 2nd thing I disliked was the ending. All the human bad guys got their just desserts and all the human good guys got babes and lived happily ever after. I think grown up books ought not to have fairytale endings.

The last major thing, which I both liked and disliked is the long time the humans stayed in space. Based on current knowledge and technology, there's a limit to how long we can survive in microgravity. However, it is most likely that is a solvable problem. The humans stayed 40 years in space waiting for the spiders to develop technologically because a planetary base is needed for the level of technology a space faring civilization requires. This makes a lot of sense. It reminded me of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a well written imaginative story that (for me) was spoilt by the impossibility of not only rebuilding the human race but human technology on barren rocks in space.

This was an enjoyable book. I didn't see much hard science fiction in it, but the author has some intriguing ideas. I doubt I'll look for more of the author's work, his writing style detracts from the quality of the story.