Maureen F. McHugh

The (very) good: it perfectly and subtly depicts the way life is in a half-hearted tired communist state, with the mixture of fear/constant threat/guilt for being slightly different and apparent normalcy that can hardly be understood by those not living through it; it also catches the atmosphere of gloom and its effects (depression, suicide) and the constant desperation to do something to hide that from one's own mind. Some characters are well drawn and the reader gets to genuinely care about them. The writing is excellent, realistic but fluid. 4,5/5 there. But:
The bad: the use of way too many first-person points of view is unusual in a tiresome and unnecessary way. Some are totally useless, go nowhere and should have been cut out (the Angel and San Xiang chapters). The rhythm, already quite slow, does not keep up constantly.
The worse: it is not really science fiction; the scifi elements are too few, too low-key, lame/uninteresting and actually just there to offer the pretext for the background.
The worst: the end leaves some story lines unfinished, not in a ”what if?” sense, but in a ”the author did not feel like writing the book any more” way. For example, there is a lot of build up in a life threatening situation on a colony on Mars, where something is wrong and the characters try to find out what and, well, not die, and then... the book ends. What was actually wrong? Was it solved and how? Did they die? We will never know, cause the story just is not continued. Why all the build up then? And it is not the only story line started and not really going somewhere.
To sum up, I really enjoyed reading it and wanted much more of it; but that went on through a constant struggle with some uninspired auctorial choices, so in the end it feels more like a 3,5/5.… (mer)