| Apparently this book got compared to Starship Troopers by Heinlein by a lot of people, hence the Hugo nomination. Where people got that comparison I have no idea.
None of the characters was very believable to me. The technology was very much smattered around without any real explanation about it, which is a terrible why to do Sci-Fi. If you took out all the stuff about SmartBlood it wouldn't have changed the book any. Chorphyll skin gets mentioned as such once and no one ever says why. Regeneration? Extra nutrients/energy from sunlight?
The one inch aliens actually disqualify the book as pure Sci-Fi. There is a known hard limit on how complex a molecule has to be to exchange energetic impulses and on how many of those impulses near each other are required to produce thoughts of a certain complexity. No matter how you folded a brain that was inside a one inch alien, it wouldn't be enough to produce thought complex enough to develop technology. Also due to technology of scale the engines on planes and such wouldn't actually be able to be proportional to said aliens. So even if they were one inch tall, their planes would be about as big as our stuff has to be.
The idea that Earth would end up being backwards, divided, and provincial while the initial colonizing effort encountered hostile aliens and geared up accordingly is the only thing about the book I really bought.
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"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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