I just finished reading this book. It was pretty good, except that I keep getting
flashes that Vinge, through Nuwen kinda agrees with the hyperevil Tomas Nau on a lot
of things. Also, as in _A Fire Upon the Deep_, Vinge's characterizations of aliens
seemed much too anthropomorphic for my tastes. Perhaps that was intended, given the
Focused translations. But it seems to me that, human in the Olag Stapledon tradition
though they may be, aliens should still be aliens and be inscrutable to some degree.
Another thing -- does Vinge have a fixation on Pham Nuwen, the "hero to match and best
all heroes"? I get uneasy when, like Frank Herbert does in Dune, an author cultivates
his antagonists to be supermen due to a rough childhood. It is a trope that I find to
be manifestly untrue -- people succeed mostly due to hard work and perserverance,
timeliness and fortunate circumstances and not through the principle "if it doesn't
kill you it will make you stronger".
