While I enjoyed the book enough to begin reading the second book in the series, Echopraxia, it was frustrating. It contained too much jargon too early. I know better readers that love what I'm complaining about though: thickening a setting with made up or obscure nouns. I can't stand it. It also told a blurry story.

The book explored many awesome concepts, biologically plausible vampires for one ("space vampires" is how many people remember the book), but most concepts were pursued too obliquely to be satisfying. For that matter, the story was told too obliquely, blurry as I said, but that might've been a deliberate choice given the (dis)abilities of the character telling the story. (It might also be an exaggeration of the author's normal style now that I'm a few chapters into the second book.)

Some of the other concepts explored were the role of sentience in intelligence, first contact, a few flavors of transhumanism told with deeper reasoning than I've read elsewhere, space travel, virtual reality, human purpose in a post-scarce world, biological curiousities as implied by the book's title, and probably others that I'm forgetting. It was a lot of good broth and little beef though. For all of these concepts, I don't understand the author's view of them and how they coexist. It often felt like the author was avoiding the plainness that I wanted. It felt like they created mystery by telling the story mysteriously rather than telling a story that contained mysteries.

But I did enjoy it on net. The concepts were cool and it kept my interest even if I didn't want the insecure arrangement of words.

I give it three meat morsels on the k00bimeater.