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Originally Posted by queentess
Indeed, it would appear you've summed it up nicely. It sounds like Mirror's Edge meets Heinlein's Friday meets Piers Anthony. Racy cover too (that's what reminded me of Friday).
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The US cover is intentional and you can argue that it fits the book perfectly.
Cory Doctorow was very positive about the book:
http://boingboing.net/2008/11/10/sat...ldren-str.html
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When Charlie Stross -- the mad, gonzo antipope of science fiction -- told me he was working on a Heinlein-esque novel, I wasn't surprised. Old Robert A. Heinlein's classic fiction was some of the best action-driven sf ever written. Then Charlie told me he was working a late Heinlein-esque novel and my eyes bugged out.
Towards the end of his career, RAH's novels got very long, very meandering, explicitly sexual, and very weird. Turned out, he had a tumor that was blocking the flow of blood to his brain (really!) and after it was removed, his fiction (and, reportedly, his personality) really changed again.
And it was those giant, pervy books that Charlie was setting out to pay tribute to.
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What's more, Stross manages to find the narrative juice hidden in this constrained version of space-travel: to tell a tightly plotted, Maltese-Falcon-esque thriller with reversals and surprises galore, spread out across decades of objective and subjective time.
It's quite a remarkable trick. It's one that neither Heinlein, nor Asimov (the other author to whom the book is dedicated -- as is only proper, given Asimov's prominence in society's conception of what a robot is) managed. This is a fabulous book, a witty and deep critique of the field's shibboleths, and well worth the price of admission.
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