About 3/4 through The Mote In God's Eye.
This book is fucking slow for about 200 pages. There's some cool world building, a lot of expository science stuff, whatever. It's intriguing, but not particularly compelling. Then, like, I don't know, the authors just drop a fucking bomb about halfway through and the book goes nuts. It's been nonstop action and tension ever since then. So far, it lives up to the hype.
My only complaint, besides the fact that about a hundred pages should have been cut from the first half, is the fucking Sally character. Everything she does is simultaneously incorrect and obnoxious. She's an inexperienced, selfish, naive, and racist character who is oblivious to all of these flaws, and it appears that every other character is just as oblivious as she is. She's also an anthropologist. The authors spend way too much time emphasizing that she's a female defying the expectations of women in society while they themselves are actually failing to subvert those tropes that plague female characters in this era of science fiction. She attempts to not become, in her words, a trophy wife for some navy guy or a politician, but for the purposes of the story that's exactly what she is. Her incompetence advances the plot, and the only thing that defines her character besides being terrible at her job is the fact that she's a female.
/rant. Good book, would recommend.
She's around my age, I think. I don't think she meets many people who read, so she's very eager for me to read some of her favorites. But I've got a long to-read list!
