This is a fun, fast read that you can easily digest on a two-hour flight. It's limited only by Nourse's outrageously inept supporting characters. Nourse is an extraordinary tale-teller, with an incisively intelligent imagination, but he nearly completely ignored the instillation of even the barest of common sense in the story's peripheral characters, shaving a star from my rating. While these personages are colorful, they do really dumb things; do you mean to tell me that in 2100 any halfway-conniving schmuck can get into top secret, classified info at the world's most prestigious teaching hospital? Yeah. It's stuff like that that throws a minor damper on the story. Still, it's worth a read for anyone who enjoys medical sci-fi and future-world dystopian fiction, for it passed my sci-fi litmus test: there was awesomely righteous crap in there I'd never thought of! ( )