Potentially interesting story, tediously told. I gave up on it. There really seemed to me only enough material to make a compelling novella. All attempts by Modesitt to create tension and suspense failed. The pacing creeps and he falls into repetitive narrative loops. ( )

This was an interesting, almost old fashioned, hard science novel. Don't misunderstand, there are a few real people in this, and even a romance, to go along with the math.

Through a fairly believable set of preconditions, the majority of the character interaction is through text messages. It heightens the focus and pushes the plot along nicely, but seems a bit forced at times.

The world building is handled by that same device, a series of news articles interspersed with everything else. It always left me wanting more.

Overall, it was easy to read and kept me turning pages to find out what happens yet.

Oddly though, it's just full of, well, "hanging chad".
There are all these little hints to where the book is going, that are just dropped and never heard from again. It must have been deliberate, but I found it disappointing.

All in all, not life changing, but enjoyable. ( )

Had potential but the plot was lost in the lengthy details about space, politics and other stuff. ( )

Interesting and pretty well paced though, it was a bit repetitive due to the format. And it had to dress up the story in an ‘international’ crisis and technical glitches. ( )

An astrophysicist stationed at a telescope on the far side of the moon makes an amazing discovery. He pen pal, a space pilot, is sent to check it out. But so are the Chinese (or in the book, the Sinese Federation), and they, apparently, are being run by a bunch of paranoid and war-mongering nut-jobs.

I liked some parts of this story.
-It does a good job at reminding us that dull, routine duties constitute the largest part of most jobs, even cool things like flying spaceships and running a space telescope.
-It has a fair amount of physics technobabble. Some of it is even plausible.
-There is relevant commentary about the long-term effects of the societal choices we are making in the U.S. now, specifically on energy, the economy, infrastructure, and the environment.

And some things just didn't work for me.
-The relationship between the two main characters didn't make a lot of sense. They met briefly, once, and began a (very) long distance personal relationship via space e-mail. Not impossible, but the basis for it is never satisfactorily explained.
-The paranoia of the Sinese makes no sense at all. Why are they so determined to start a global war? How did what amounts to inmates at a home for delusional sociopaths come to dominate the nation? Yes, I know it sometimes seems like the world is dominated by maladjusted six-year-olds, but these guys are loony.
-And then there's the prose. It seems, well, clunky, unpolished, sometimes verbose. Here's an example (from page 304) that kind of made me cringe: "The only explanation he could come up with for their explanation was that the hexagons below had projected some form of energy in a hexagonal field, but that field had spread slightly and manifested itself as a circle in whatever effect it had upon the substance of the hull." I think that sentence could use a bit of work.
-There are typos, especially in the snippets of space e-mail. I'm not sure if these are intentional to make them appear more realistic or if the editor just missed them.

The story bogs down in places and sometimes requires a bit of effort to get the meaning from the prose, but the protagonists are likable folks doing admirable work. Their story is a good one. ( )