Read two more Fosters. Midworld was sort of my high bar for Foster but I've finished Nor Crystal Tears and that may well top it. I don't know that I buy Foster's thesis regarding humanity's psychoses (at least to the extent he does) and, oddly, I liked the Thranx, as a species, less in this book than I did in other books, but I liked the Thranx protagonist quite a bit and thought it was all very interesting. Back on the negative side of the ledger, the plotting was extremely convenient, but still crisp and energetic. Most importantly, is it one of those stories that makes you think. It doesn't really spell out the concept (or perhaps even intend it) but it did make me think of how, if a human is kept in solitary confinement for awhile they generally go nuts and, in a sense, the human race, as long as it's the only known sentient species, is in a sort of solitary confinement and could be seen as nuts. And that is one of the most interesting aspects of Foster's universe, to me: the Human/Thranx symbiosis (though that is not remotely the case yet, in this book of first contact). You read a lot of alien "enemies" and a lot of alien "allies" and lot of all sorts of varieties but Foster's symbiotic approach is fairly uncommon.
The next Foster I read was The Man Who Used the Universe, which is one of his relatively few non-Humanx SF novels. I suppose this is technically worse than, e.g., Midworld or Nor Crystal Tears but I kinda loved it despite, again, not really liking the protagonist at all, even to the extent that "the story" likes him, so to speak. Some of it doesn't entirely make sense and things do work out awfully conveniently sometimes with a bit too inexplicable and omniscient a protagonist and it may go one loop too many in the "deceptive veils" of the narrative and so on. So if you don't want to like the book, it'd be easy to dislike. But if you do find it all interesting, it's really, really easy to get involved and fascinated by it. It's like a weird blend of Algis Budrys and Ayn Rand and more usual Foster. Basically, a new, small-time hoodlum walks into a place of business with a job to get some money out of the owner or whack him and, 300 pages later, he's the title character. In between, he works for and against his own race and the exceedingly weird and ugly Nuel (a great conception and depiction of aliens) in an effort, in part, to preserve his own freedom of action. And then it moves on to even bigger things. And that has it doing one of the things I love about certain novels: I hate 1000 page tomes that tread a lot of water and hardly go anywhere or do anything. I love books where, at the end of two or three hundred pages, you look back at the opening pages and can hardly believe they start the same book - where so much has happened that you feel like you've really covered some ground. So, yeah: I wouldn't argue that this is objectively his best novel or anything and recognize it wouldn't appeal to some at all but, if anything in this sounds like it might appeal, I would recommend checking it out. And, back on Nor Crystal Tears, I more generally recommend that, too.
Maybe it'll pick up for me soon.
