The writing style put me off immediately — too pretentious and flourished, while descriptions are paradoxically lacking (I still only have a very faint idea of what a freaking tree-ship looks like) and the author has an irritating tendency to delay explanations of his sci-fi concepts and vocabulary for hundreds of pages when adding just a few words in passing would have made the reading so much easier — and it all became clearer when the poet character launched into a diatribe about writing, poetry and all that stuff.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

I don’t care for poetry, I care about story. And the thing is… well, this happens to be a fantastic story (or, rather, collection of full-fledged stories, connected by tightening threads, in a consistent universe). On the other hand, it’s also a story that doesn’t have a fucking end — I was silently shouting “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!” when I finished reading the last page… but couldn’t resist opening Amazon immediately to order the next volume.