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This author is brilliant. She's good at portraying complicated and changing relationships between people. She inserts sticky ethical situations without blatant moralizing. By the end of the book I still wasn't sure of the author's own opinion on her azi characters, who are a class of genetically engineered, mind-altered servants (slaves). There's a sexual assault and the rug-sweeping that goes on afterward is sadly too real.

This was published in 1989, so 34 years later some of the 'futuristic' technology is a little off: people still use payphones, for example. There's light-speed travel, but it's also possible to escape detection on a nighttime river boating trip as long as you turn off your running lights. Hilariously, she also kept those sunken living room conversation pits that were popular in the 70s.

My main complaints about this book are that I feel the plot didn't progress much in the third quarter, one of the two main characters was never given agency (not totally their fault), and I didn't much like the occasional political situation info-dumping. It also ends without resolving everything, but it's a trilogy so that's par for the course.

This would be an amazing work to discuss at a book club.