This book seemed to be a fairly strong critique of gender relations wrapped up in a science fiction story. At times, there was a strong element of 1950s pulp sci-fi, right down to lots of made up jargon (which I found jarring, rather than contributing to the story); at others, the author's view of men as ... less than shining exemplars of humanity was uppermost, making the book read like a gender studies text. When it was at its most engaging, the author focused on the two primary relationships and less on the sci-fi or the explicit social commentary (either on gender or ecology). It seemed to me that with some tighter editing, this could have been a 3 1/2 - 4 star kind of book. At a high level, the plot, the themes and the characterization worked decently, but they didn't mesh well enough to really make the book take off for me.