I don't know how this won the Arthur C. Clark Award and the Phillip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. I really don't. The narrative jumps around without much warning, to the point where you're not sure what character's being talked about or whether it's the past, present, or future. It uses a terse pseudo noir narration that makes all that worse by cutting out words that would help the reader figure that kind of thing out. Characters react to things in ways that often make no sense from what's happening or what another character is doing.

By the book's end it's hard to figure out what the point of Nova Swing really was. Nothing you think would be resolved is resolved. The people you thought were the main characters just drift off, letting the book end with characters I had no investment in. I stuck around to see how things developed... then they never developed.

...at least it wasn't boring?