I found the ideas in 'Probability Moon' intriguing but the writing was a little dry until almost the end of the book. Oddly perhaps, it was the humans in the story who I had difficulty engaging with. I eventually became quite engaged with Enli, the main alien character.

The humans are split into two: a four-person team of anthropologists down on the planet 'studying' the indigenous culture's concept of 'shared reality' and a military ship carrying out the real mission - to acquire what is believed to be an ancient alien weapon in orbit around the planet.

The military mission was more interesting for the physics being discussed and for providing the background on how the interstellar human diaspora, enabled by a network of 'gates' built by an ancient, now vanished, race are at war with an alien species who use the same inherited technology and who no interest in anything except expansion and extermination. The military characters were an unconvincing collection of stereotypes whose main function seemed to be to exposition.

The anthropologists were more interesting. I've never seen classic Persian poetry used as a reference for divining the meaning of events on an alien planet before in the way the Iranian team leader did. There was an American character with an undiagnosed God complex, a woman xenobiologist who seemed to be there to explain the physical differences between humans and aliens and a large jovial German geologist who was the easiest to like and also the least introspective.

At first, I couldn't see any connection between the two human missions. It took longer than it should have done to see that the book title was a clue to the concept behind both military and anthropological missions. This concept linked the apparently sociological phenomenon of Shared Reality with the observer effect in quantum mechanics.

The thing I liked most about the book was seeing the world through Enli's eyes. I liked that when I first met Enli, she was an outsider in her own culture. I quickly learned that she was 'Unreal'. Understanding what that meant and how it worked was, for me, the most interesting part of the book. I thought that Nancy Kress did a great job of making human behaviour seem odd by establishig Enli's people as a baseline for normal.

I enjoyed the ideas in the book but I couldn't engage with the human characters. I wasn't invested in the outcome of the military mission, even when the crew was at risk. The anthropologists were interesting mainly because they demonstrated how hard it is to see another culture clearly when you are unaware of the blindspots created by your own cultural biases.

'Probability Moon' is the first book in a trilogy but I won't be moving on to the other books. I think these stories at too abstract for me. ( )

Very good SF about World where Earth has discovered that one of 7 moons is actually a powerful weapon that it decides to try to get back thru a travel tunnel. Complications arise as to its value to the home ?World? and other artifacts present on the planet.

A team of human scientists arrive on a planet ostensibly to study the society of its pre-industrial people who have an interesting concept of "shared reality" that keeps them pretty peaceful... or controlled? Also, one of their "moons" is actually a remnant of the same technology as the star gates that humanity is using for their interplanetary travel. This orb may be important because humanity is engaged in a genocidal war with another species, and they're currently losing.
The team must manage both the primary objective of scientific and anthropological study (along with the common non-interference principle) while also investigating the nature of the orb and maybe whether it's causing this "shared reality" thing?

It's been about a year and a half since I read this book (I'm really behind on my book reviews, sigh) and I didn't remember much about this one after reading the description. I opened it back up and a lot more came back to me. While the story was entertaining, and I seem to remember I sped through the trilogy in a week, I'm not finding much memorable about it. ( )

A strong cultural-conflict type science fiction novel. The military characters are somewhat one-dimensional, but most of the book is dedicated to the more interesting interactions between the research team, which Kress invests with a fun mix of personalities, and the aliens, who are endowed with a novel and thought-provoking biological adaptation. Will definitely plan to read on in this series. ( )

Some intriguing stuff in here, but a lot of genre trash to wade through to get to it.