Anvil of Stars

Wow, that was a hell of a book. I rated it lower because the story got so tedious in the middle I almost gave up. Glad I stuck with it to the end though. An entertaining book in the first and last thirds. And the middle third did serve a purpose, setting up story and new ideas. Just dragged a bit.

It's so ambitious as a book! A new form of very small human society. A fascinating alien species brought in halfway through the book with totally different psychology and cognition. Truly alien, in other words. And then the reveal towards the end about the nature of the enemy they are hunting. almost incomprehensible in its alienness. And Bear isn't afraid of that, leans into it, the experience of being overwhelmed with power and strangeness is something both the characters and we the reader experience. Very nice writing.

I also appreciated the subversion of tropes, much like the first book. Specifically the nature of what our heroes end up doing and the moral and social consequences of that.

I also want to acknowledge how much better written this book is. I complained about how the first book was awfully White Dude and the characters were wooden. Not so here, the social drama is very well written. And there are good women characters. He wrote it only a few years after the first book, surprised to see so much evolution in his writing style.