Books like Heart of the Comet

I put off reading this book for a very long time, for mathematical reasons. David Brin is one of my absolute favorite writers; let's say my opinion of him is a 9 out of 10 (and nobody gets a 10). Gregory Benford was an unknown quantity, but probability told me that I wouldn't like his writing as much as Brin's. Even if I rated Benford as an 8, the average of that would be 8.5, lower than my expectations for a Brin book. Are you following me so far?For the first 100 pages of this book, I had no idea why I was reading it. I couldn't tell what the central conflict was going to be, and the leading candidates--a petty and bizarre prejudice leading to discord, and a plague--both bored me. All I can say is that it got better. Whether it got better enough to warrant slogging through the lengthy exposition, I'm not sure even now. Still, like all of Brin's books this left me with things to think about.So I guess my self-imposed ban on collaborative novels has been lifted, tentatively.