Are you a vegetarian yet?

One thing that needs to be covered first about this book is that if there is any book that will make you turn vegetarian, this might very well be the one.

An interesting thing is how everything goes down the drain so quickly, when the musicologist dies right after they land, you get the feel that it is going to be a gradual dying off, not the sudden killing of everyone else in a few pages. What this showed was that even if you begin to believe you understand a society, you are still likely to miss something and that one thing can send the entire plan on a huge tremendous down swing. While it was good to see how everything feel so quickly, after all the buildup, it seemed a let down.

Stylistically, I didn't like the idea of going into the viewpoint of the two Jana'ata. It made them much more human, and this made them more relatable, which I thought was actually unfortunate as it hurt they idea of them being truly "other". While Russel may have been trying to make us relate to the Jana'ata and see how we had the potential to evolve as they did. She tries to make a contrast between, "oh don't they seem so much more like us" and "what kind of creatures are they" and while this is obviously drawn, I feel that it took concentration away from actually exploring the differences and uniqueness of their society and turning into some relation to the Middle Ages of nobles and peasants.