Novellas: awful format for sci-fi. Tchaikovsky does not have a bad idea here, nor has he written it poorly. That being said, its crammed into half the size it needed to be. There's no capacity for suspense, since every little dropped hint about what could happen in the future hits you like a truck. The plot is rushed, events occur with little time to sink in - because of this, everything is transparent. There are no twists and turns because you know what will happen before it eventually goes down two pages later.