absurdsam's review
4.0
This book is one of my earliest ventures into sci-fi and was crucial to my desire for imaginative things to read. From a future in which humanity achieves technical-immortality through biotechnology to dragons who love in the accretion disk of a binary star system (made of star stuff themselves), this book has wonderful world-building, a plot with a clear goal. But it lacks a compelling cast of characters. The primary of theses are thrust into a romance that... feels terrible and off. The captain of the ship feels like a stereotype of 'strong woman secretly want to submit to a man' and feels the need to hide her enjoyment of pink and soft things. Her love interest is a man so obsessed with his work that he gets offended when 6 seconds of his time is wasted waiting. 6 seconds. Jesus. The other characters are otherwise well developed and with clear differences in personality.
Humanity also seems to have become rather conceited after a achieving immortality, and upon encountering the dragon species, that may or may not be sapient, they figure that there is no issue with killing a few for the sake of their goal. Lets be clear here, this species might be sapient (which is implied later in the book that they are!), but the cast (save for one, and only temporarily) has concluded that it doesn't matter since they can't tell whether or not they are. Their inherently exploitative goal is considered more important than the existence of the dragons.
An interesting scenario for this book, but not a very optimistic one in terms of basic decency towards non-human living beings.
Humanity also seems to have become rather conceited after a achieving immortality, and upon encountering the dragon species, that may or may not be sapient, they figure that there is no issue with killing a few for the sake of their goal. Lets be clear here, this species might be sapient (which is implied later in the book that they are!), but the cast (save for one, and only temporarily) has concluded that it doesn't matter since they can't tell whether or not they are. Their inherently exploitative goal is considered more important than the existence of the dragons.
An interesting scenario for this book, but not a very optimistic one in terms of basic decency towards non-human living beings.
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