Neverness, by David Zindell
What's this obsession with the primitive?
(Review posted 26 Jul 2004 01:07:24)

This is basically a good far-future story about interstellar civilization, bold pilots exploring the mysteries of the galaxy, love and lust and parenthood, the nature of divinity, the purpose of life, and like that. It's a bit dark, and not all of it makes really convincing sense, but basically it's good stuff.

One small thing that I'll take another paragraph or two to mention and to wonder about: very much like Williams' Aristoi, this far-future ultra-tech book, where the protagonists have lots of very high technology and nanotech and stuff like that, spends quite a fraction of its pages in a primitive environment where people have little or no technology and spend time sticking spears into each other and remarking to themselves about the smell of rotting flesh and so on.

In both cases I would rather have heard more about the cool new tech than the stinky old stuff. But maybe that's just me.