Good ideas, thin execution I enjoyed the core ideas in this book, and especially appreciated that the aliens were pretty different from humans (although still living in a similar atmosphere). No Star Trek/Wars simple mask on a biped here. It was very thin on the economic and social consequences of the brutal stratification the alien race instituted. There is a rich history of this problem in humanity, but it was treated as though it had never been encountered before. District 9 is a good benchmark for this, and the book made no effort to even get close. In the end, it was a relatively fun story that had the opportunity to study complex problems but chose merely to point them out, and possibly even imply they were not that complex after all.