This is a book that I picked up on my last trip out (from Half-price books I think) and I finally got a chance to read it on the flight from Tokyo to San Francisco. It was a good book, I enjoyed it. It was a nice departure from the science fiction that I have been reading lately because there was no mention of “singularity” and almost no computer use. Lately it seems like I am only reading singularity-based computer virtual reality books with personality downloading into mechanical matrixes because we have basically perfected storing models of conciousness. Those books are fine and good, but it was nice to get back to a more traditionaly space ships and aliens sci-fi novel. Still, for that genre this book was a bit out of the ordinary: it is one of the few that I can remember that limits itself to our solar system.

I enjoyed the biological / evolution / ecological system aspect of the book. It turns out it was written by professors of mathematics and a biology, so it makes sense that they put a lot of thought into those areas of the book. It took a while for me to get into it, but once I got into it things picked up. It looks like this might be hard to get ahold of, but if you see it around you might enjoy it. I thought that the aliens in the book were interesting and well thought out. I think the idea of putting aliens in our solar system now is a pretty gutsy move, and it is fun reading sci-fi that is set “in the neighborhood.”