Books like Heads

Storyline: 3/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 3/5I liked this to a degree that might be challenging to defend. I suppose it is because it was largely free of major errors and never promised more than it delivered. Certainly, I could have asked that the two plotlines in the story better merge. It would not have been overly demanding to expect that Bear be either a little more original or insightful with his complaints against organized religion. The setting too, warranted more detail. The story takes place on the moon, but it could just as easily have been set in two different galaxies or two different American states. It was the organizational structure of business arrangements that Bear spent most of his worldbuilding efforts on. That barely would have been enough to ground a longer work, but it was plenty enough to support this thin 151-page novella. Heads was also something of a bureaucratic procedural. I was surprised at the tension and emotion Bear was able to generate through this. Again, the short format helped here, Bear successfully implementing a device that might have turned stale if overused in a longer work. Overall, it was simply a capably written, interesting tale set in a modestly creative environment.I read this as the sequel to \ Queen of Angels\ . There is not much of an overlap between the two. There’s some mention of bio- or genetic customization that appears in both books, but they play very minor roles in each. I suppose they complement one another. There does not seem to be any advantage offered to those who already read Queen of Angels nor is there any need for readers of the first to continue to the second – no new answers or connections are made. They are very different with both style and substance, and it is something of a feat, I suppose, to make two so wildly different books part of the same series.