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It's a Greg Egan novel -- which means that half of it is an extrapolation of theoretical physics in another universe. Which all the characters understand right off the bat, or even worse, understand implicitly. Half the fun of Egan is working out what underlying physics model is responsible for half the odd things you see in the beginning of the book, but once the protagonist becomes a physicist and starts laboriously explaining it, it becomes fairly obvious that you're reading an arXiv paper.

The physics of this one is tricky, as initially I had thought that it was set in our universe with their planet under extreme time-shifted velocity relative to the rest of the system. It is not. It is different from beginning to end, it just looks deceptively similar. See the video here for more details.

So what's the rest of the novel like? The protagonist is a female in a species with a particularly nasty biological quirk, and has to deal with the sexism and cultural expectations in a world where females are not expected to rise to a position of strength. She has to deal with males who think her professional existence against nature, and resist the attractions of males for her duty. All like our own world, but not quite. Again, you can clearly see Egan's hand at work underneath the scenes, but the rigorous rational nature of the book and the protagonists ensure that there aren't too many surprises here.

All things considered, it's a fun read, but limited by the lack of personal fulfillment in the protagonist's life -- she is attracted to science, but defending herself against the society around her. With that in mind, it's at least workmanlike if not joyful.

I read this on the Kindle. Fully half this book is composed of footnotes, citations and indices. This is a very well researched book.

It's also a funny one. The author makes no secret that he doesn't think much of the standard model of human sexuality, but he's at his best when tearing apart a hapless researcher who defines their evidence in terms of the model instead of the other way around. And there's many, many targets to choose from. Not a chapter goes without some new clunker dropped.

There are some places where the author seemingly picks and chooses his evidence as loosely as his targets. notably when he claims that a male preference in porn for many men on a single woman was a result of our innate wiring, because there are more "guy on girl" than "girls on a single guy" videos.

According to the book, female vocalizations (to call other men closer), the slower rampup time and prolonged heat, combined with the capacity for multiple orgasm mean that women, when they felt like having sex, would have sex with one guy and then pick several likely candidates to follow up with if they were still in the mood. Sounds good. So why is this a fantasy for men, when it should really be a fantasy for women?

And that's where it really needs to make its case: one of the premises is that female sexuality has been driven and suppressed to the extent that even when in a study of sexual behavior, the best way to get good statistical data is to tell people they're hooked up to a lie detector, or use data that cannot be faked and does not rely on self-reporting, such as measuring brainwaves or bloodflow. But by using this argument as his yardstick, he's essentially saying that most sex data gathered about western women is skewed, either by the researchers or by the subjects themselves. It's a big argument to swallow, and I'm not sure I entirely buy it. It also doesn't cover the female fascination with romance novels on one end, shading to yoai / slash fiction as it gets more "hardcore." If this is a cultural habit rather than an inbuilt preference, it's a counterintuitive one.

That being said, his general thesis stands up. Daniel Dunbar talks about language as a grooming activity and says its a more efficient replacement than grooming for nits. Ryan says sex itself is a grooming activity, and one that is amazingly effective at holding groups together. After seeing the evidence he provides, I think he's probably right.

I'm mildly disgusted that these guys get to pass off what they did as science. They took a bunch of data from places that had positive bias in a dozen different places, then used that to support the dominant sexual paradigms without considering the first mover advantage and lock-in effect. (Sadly, this does a disservice to the OKCupid statisticians, who are rigorous about what they can and can't say about their data.) And then they added cartoon stereotypes on top of that -- Elmer Fudd is the man, tirelessly hunting for pussy, and Miss Marple the female detective, endlessly searching for the perfect mate.

I'll give you an example about just one of the experiments -- the one that says "men will say yes to a woman who walks up to them on the street and asks to have sex with them, and women will say no." Thereby proving that women have measurably different brains than men and are not interested in meaningless sex.

The problem is that, once you get into various different settings and various different scenarios, it turns out that most of the women didn't want to have sex with a random guy on campus because the last time they did it, it was terrible. [1] They weren't against meaningless sex at all -- they were against BAD sex. The men had never been propositioned by women, so didn't know that it probably wasn't going to be good.

In summary, this is one of those crap evolutionary psychology books that look suspiciously like "just so" stories that just happen to reflect the author's anecdotal prejudices. Avoid.

[1] yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/gender-differences-and-casual-sex-the-new-research/

It wasn't that I disliked this book, so much as I was consistently confused as to why people liked it so much. It struck me as rewarmed Jonathan Carroll from the beginning, with a passive and strangely thoughtless protagonist and a plot that makes Lost look coherent. As the book goes on, he faces a number of dream-like challenges, all somehow linked to something that happened in the Russo-Japanese War... but it's obvious that it will continue to be dreamlike and amorphous. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope while listening to an accountant tell you about his day at work.

Eventually, it amorphously and dreamily resolves itself into a happy ending for not much reason, at which point you're given the idea that it was all for the best really and alls well that ends well. Jolly good show and all that.

And that... is it. This is a book that doesn't even try to insult your intelligence.

What utter tripe.

However. Paul Bryant's review on this page is genius, and you should read it. It's compelling high art.