A fixup novel of stories published in Galaxy, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Analog in the last 1960's and early 70s. Distressingly poor. Fixups (novels originally published as a series of short stories) often suffer from the need to repeat basic world-building, but this suffers even more from the repetition of numerous narrative sins. First, there's the unrelenting reduction of women to sexual objects in extremis. In the first half, when any women is introduced, she's immediately characterized as either having magnificent breasts or other enticing features. or being dumpy. His terminology. Second, the world building fails on numerous grounds. By 2060 we have numerous colonies scattered around the galaxy. Plenty of alien creatures though none as advanced as humans. Still, some are probably somewhat intelligent and it is the job of the Practical Philosophers, aka Consciences, to determine if the inhabitants of a planet are intelligent enough that humans need to leave. Unbelievable this judgment is made by one person, pretty much by the seat of his or her pants, based on pretty crude anthropological observations over a few days. The aliens aren't all that alien. The author apparently felt there wasn't enough action in that plot device so there's also a political group called the New Romans to oppose the Consciences. The New Romans are not just wrong, they're out and out murderous villains. Rabbits are pulled out of hats. Info is dumped. Sex is had, but off stage. Etc.

Highly not recommended. ( )

Very dated work of juvenile science fiction. I disliked the loosely jointed, episodic stories that make up the novel proper, and the occasional bouts of late 60s, early 70s, slang were particularly jarring and bounced me out of the narrative every time.

The story concept wasn't terribly bad, but there are a lot better works of this sort of exploratory SF available. Recommend James Alan Gardner, Ursula Le Guin, Sylvia Louise Engdahl instead. ( )