This book will suck you into it. ( )

Tiptree honours list 2004. Monotonous, middle-class soap; hardly enough science fiction in it to be worth the name. What were the Tiptree award people thinking? Got half-way and couldn't be bothered to continue. ( )

a very understated account of a brilliant female scientist, whose career difficulties are gender-based. the background setting is a world gradually falling into chaos based on geopolitical issues generated in our present. the research involves DNA changing, rapidly altering male/female characteristics. it's also a realistic account of a marriage from the point of view of both parties and even of the small child they share, of a number of friendships complicated over time in a culture that's very gradually disintegrating, and of the central character's experience of the world around her. her view of and response to the events in her life is also driven by her experience of a rape she never reveals to anyone: instead perennially stepping around it in every situation, always attempting to placate aggressors though she sees clearly their duplicity as they attempt to silence her or arrange to take credit for her work. because she has some form of undiagnosed Asperger's, she also has difficulty meeting people head-on, preferring to prioritize work over socializing, especially because she knows very well she's onto something world-changingly important. but she has an unusual voice and point of view. altogether a very thought-provoking book on many fronts, which could have been marketed as mainstream fiction, but which because of its setting reads very much like Kim Stanley Robinson's way of telling a story, and to him she dedicates the book. ( )

A tremendously moving book about one woman's scientific career, its stops and starts, the life she builds for herself, and the earthshattering discovery she makes. I loved it. ( )

I was excited by the idea of this book: a near-future woman scientist's discovery of some paradigm-shifting biological sex genetic thingy. And I read the whole thing straight through (have a cold) but what I came away with was that Jones's characterizations are bizarrely homophobic and even misogynist. Certainly Jones is willing to have the one lesbian character in the book be an avowed woman-hater and the one "lesbian" sex scene is as bad as some kind of 80s-era Naiad Press romance: "...they got naked and lay between them, and hugged and kissed and nuzzled and licked and enjoyed each other..." All non-gender-conforming and/or queer people in this novel are characterized as freaks, unstable, immoral, frivolous, or ugly. Seriously? This won the James Tiptree prize? ( )