This was an excellent book. For me, it was a required read for a college Sci Fi class; having the option of an audio book was most beneficial in forming the story in my head.

I loved this book. I see why it won awards. It has a bit of a learning curve for the zones, but the blending of totally alien races into outstanding characters is excellent. The story leaves lots of possible adventures of minor characters open to imagine on your own as while. But the ending was also a curious twist of tactic and gain-loss calculus. Excellent story. Recommend to SF fans of first encounters, ship opera, and multiple alien races. Two big thumbs up!

This was a very high-concept sci-fi/space opera with tons of characters and creatures and ideas. Some of the concepts sort of got jumbled up and I found myself confused about what was going on. I don't blame the author for this, just my own lack of attention. This is a book that needs your attention, which is why I failed to finish reading it way back some twenty years ago when I tried it as a teenager. Now I tried listening to it while mowing my lawn and changing the oil and cleaning the gutters, which in retrospect is about the same amount of attention that I could devote to a book when I was fifteen, just for different reasons. Either way, I've never been too in to the whole anthropomorphizing thing, even though these are technically extraterrestrials, it's splitting hairs because the Tines are essentially wolves who act like medieval humans, albeit with a hive intelligence. Which is neat, and the world they live in is neat, and their history is neat, but nonetheless it was hard for me to care about what i identified as a bunch of dogs acting like people. I was way more interested in Pham Nuwen's character and the superintelligent Blight, which got much less pages in the end than the Tines. The prequel to this book I think is a better book, more stable for us hard science lovers, but that being said, I still found this one to be a unique, adventurous, fun, dramatic, and 'out-there' book that is, in it's ideas and imagination, a truly original joy to experience, providing you can devote a little extra attention at the necessary moments.

Love this story and the universe...zones of thought...genius

I’m sorry this one so hard to listen too. The story was very technical who cares get on with the story.