Finder

This is a difficult book to evaluate. It's fluently written, and once it gets going the story is gripping: it's a page-turner. The world-building is quite good: it's not a very original future world, but the details are carefully and plausibly filled in.

On the other hand, it lacks any scenes that I particularly enjoy, and there isn't much characterization. The hero comes over as vaguely well-meaning, ingenious, prone to getting into trouble; but he doesn't make a big impression. The other characters are only lightly sketched.

We visit space habitats and stations, and also inhabited Mars; we travel through space on spaceships, cable cars, and flysticks; we meet people of various kinds and a mysterious race of powerful aliens whose motives are unintelligible.

Rather unusually these days, there's no sex in this book at all; I can't say I missed it. I mention it only as an afterthought. In this story, I think sex would be superfluous, a pointless distraction. There is violence, and violent death, although I think both are at a fairly normal and tolerable level for this kind of story.