This book is about a slightly far-fetched, but wonderfully well-envisioned future. Maureen McHugh has the talent of making one feel thoroughly immersed in the main characters' universe without using any of the verbal trickery or shock tactics habitually employed by her contemporaries in the so-called 'cyberpunk' movement. There's a very singular strangeness about the world as she imagines it being run by the communist Chinese, and I found myself puzzled by the end as to whether this came from the fact that such an arrangement normally would seem so unlikely, or from the fact that McHugh made it seem like such a natural development out of present cultural and economic trends.

I can see how the novel's plotlessness and the sense of irresolution that one gets at the end might have been off-putting to some, but I found that Zhang himself was the sort of character to whom this style of narrative was best suited - he's reflective without being particularly deep, and ambitious without being particularly resolute. I did want to know more about him than I'd found out by the end of the book, and about the two fascinating characters who form the book's weirdly free-floating sub-plot (which takes place on Mars). But this can't be considered a weakness of the novel, surely.