I just found out about this one. Any good? I’d love to read it, based on the ideas it works with, and Known Space being a great storytelling tool, but I’ve been burned before by books like this… (RAMA, anyone?)
I read it a while back. I thought it was pretty good, certainly better than much of his recent solo stuff. There’s a bit of shoe-horning (painful “retcon”-ing) to make the story fit with published canon, but there’s nothing new about that in the Known Space stories anyway.
I’d give it a 6/10 – worth getting around to, but not the kind of book I’d recommend moving to the top of the “to be read” pile.