It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.
Watts creates what could be a interesting world, but only gives you glimpses of it, primarily in flashbacks. The parts you do see seems almost like disparate ideas, like concepts that he couldn't fully expand into their own stories, so he jammed it into this one.
The mish-mash feeling is one that is unshakeable throughout the book. The storyline feels like a familiar, though just different enough, first contact story. However, it is interspersed with characters and concepts that are interesting on their own, but makes the story feel cluttered when combined. Perhaps the competing elements could work if Watts wrote a softer sci-fi setting, but his attempts to bring in game theory, among other attempts to make this work as hard sci-fi, only work to further bog down the story.
