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Two things to know:

This is sci-fi despite the dragon
The first chapter is torture, but it's better after that.

Plot - 85 - It's a short book. I'm unsure how many words it is, but not far beyond a novella. As such, there's not a lot of room for sub-plots, but there are a few minor sub-plots. Overall, it's a fairly solid trek through a crisis in which humanity suddenly realizes it has joined an inter-planetary consortium that is nowhere near as friendly and scholarly as it thought. It works, and the resolution is satisfying.

Characters - 75 - The characters are either alien or human. The aliens have a very foreign feeling, and there's a good sense of a very different (alien!) perspective, but this is sometimes a bit confusing. The humans are just \"ok\" and fairly stereotyped based on an obvious \"representative from various earth cultures\" basis: an American character, a British character, a Russian character, and a Japanese character. The references to communism betray the fact that this was written in the 1980s.

Editing - 100 - No problems detected.

Setting - 80 - This is a case of good and bad. What's really good is the well-portrayed diversity among the various alien species. The downside is that the world-building is sparse and leaves the reader confused at times.

Writing - 70 - The first chapter of this book is horrifically challenging to get through. The reader is faced with an (apparently) insectoid focal character, with an unpronounceable name that includes punctuation (K!rikkl), who is attending some event in which some kind of game is being played, but there are (evidently) life and death consequences (unspecified) and relation to politics (completely undefined) outside of the game. The playing pieces in this game (which might or might not be real creatures) have entirely foreign names like Knrkt and Xyigit. After the first chapter, the story thrives on its intricate, hard-core sci-fi discovery of a web of relationships among alien races.

This review is based on a re-read. I first received this book >30 years ago, and the first 3-4 times I picked it up, I failed to make it past the first chapter. Chapter 1 is a treatise on how to make the reader feel lost and confused. Sometime about 10 years ago, I finally pushed through, and then once I was past the first chapter, it got better and better. This time, I picked it up because I wanted to reply to a Reddit post and reference the horrible first chapter, and I wound up accidentally reading the whole thing cover to cover in an evening. I think it's a fun read, but it takes some real effort to make it past the first chapter, even though that's only five pages long.

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