Ha! I quite enjoyed this when I read it, but it was along time ago and even then the “of course this mutilated guy with PTSD we found in a brothel is there voluntarily” never worked for me. I did not like the sequel at all, and although I liked A Thread of Grace, her decision to decide who lived and who died based on a coin flip did not help the book AT ALL.

I went to a terrible book panel where Russell was interviewed by a local author who knew even less about SF and space exploration than Russell - she spent quite a bit of time praising Russell’s invention of the SETI program (Russell did correct her!) and once off that spent most of the time going on about how sexy Emilio was.