A strong planetary romance in the tradition of that genre, with a constant element of suspense. This is a book about life and death which lives and dies by its science-fiction premises, more than by its characters' own confrontations with its life and death motifs. For the most part, this is simply because its characters aren't all they could be, and their relationships are in many cases not at all well fleshed out. Some resolution is offered in its final ten pages, but this is really all that is given to the reader.

This is a short book, as GRRM's books go. He might be partly excused for the incompleteness of his characters and their motivations by virtue of its brevity and his comparative youth as an author at the time of its writing. He might be further excused by virtue of the compelling world he builds around them, the building of which consumes the majority of the text.

But for a book so devoted to the themes of love and life and death, we are given little by which to understand the characters' relationships to them. The dying world of Worlorn, in the end, is the main character of this book. Old Kavalar culture, whose own death approaches, is a co-star. Yet the people whose eyes we view these quite compelling developments through are largely husks.

This is a book for the science fiction reader. For the reader of GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire who was drawn in to its primary characters for their own sake, it will be a disappointment. For the reader of planetary fantasy who wishes to see a new world built and a history and the story of its culture unfolded before them, this is a very compelling title.