All the details of this were enjoyable in a mid-range Cherryh way, and then I summarized it for my other half (to explain where it fits into her considerable ouevre) and he just destroyed it for me by making the accurate observation, "So, another 'Boy Finds Hands'?"
Alas, it is another 'Boy Finds Hands', which Cherryh chugs out with regularity suggesting that those are the ones which sell. (To do: check Amazon rankings?) The deeply, deeply annoying thing about them is that the plots, the rest of her universes, are sufficiently complex and adult that there are always much more interesting characters who we mostly see through the blinkered eyes of the Boy. I find Tripoint the most exasperating of the lot, as the Boy didn't have much more on his hands than many adolescents, but his combined love-interest/dea ex machina (sp?) had a powerfully interesting backstory, which we don't see. I want a novel about her instead.
In Forge..., I have as usual nothing against the reasonably nice pupal bureaucrat who finds his hands; but I would rather have seen more of Marak's thinking; he found his hands in Hammerfall and is now capable of deciding what to do with them. Even the adult bureaucrats are more interesting than the larva. And, finally, I lost some suspension of disbelief not in the deep space/nanotech plot but in the chance that a powerful alien would be so impressed by the larva. He is a perfectly decent young man and may be impressive later, but I sure don't see the aura of greatness now.
All the women are backgrounded, too, which is increasingly annoying as the novel goes on; they tend to come into play when they do foolish things for personal reasons, which doesn't even make much sense when one of them is a near-immortal of species-spanning importance and unknown Deep Plans.
ISBN: 0380979039
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