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I would describe this novel as a beautiful painting. I have never longed for space the way I did while reading it. The asteroid terraria in particular captured my imagination — imagine a landscape sloping upward away from you in both directions to meet overhead. It must be dizzying to look up and see the tops of trees. How about Terminator, a city on rails constantly skirting Mercury's gray line to stay ahead of the deadly sunlight? What if gender and sexuality were widely accepted as continuous spectra rather than discrete, disjoint categories?

The primary protagonist, Swan Er Hong, is petulant, uncooperative, self-destructive, a tad feral — surprisingly juvenile for someone over 100 years old. Yet somehow I still found it easy to sympathize with her, even as I was constantly exasperated by her antics. Equally frustrating, but likely prophetic, is the intense fragmentation of humanity's off-world colonies, the so-called Balkanization of the solar system. Nothing could be more human than senseless tribal feuds.

The primary plot is an investigation into what can only be described as an attempted mass murder: the track carrying Terminator is destroyed by a coordinated attack of tiny projectiles flung from different parts of space. The story climaxes with a similarly coordinated cross-solar-system sting that happens almost entirely off-page, which is extremely lackluster given the stakes. The perpetrators (a collection of quantum computers in humanoid bodies) are given a brief trial and ultimately flung into deep space. Swan and Wahram are wed, and the book ends.

This is why I call the book a beautiful painting. The concepts at play are fascinating but often seem like stage props in search of a script. Some oddities of formatting in my copy lead me to wonder whether it was missing a key chunk (such is the peril of bootleg ebooks…), so I may revisit this book in print at some future date.

{{tag>fiction scifi}}