No Asimovian sentences for the author of this novel; he goes into all sorts of detail about his characters, including, god help me, which ones have "throbbing cock[s]." Oh, yes, there are sex scenes. Many of them, fairly descriptive, and that serve absolutely no point whatsoever. Ok, to be fair, some of them do serve a point. And you know what? Those are the ones that where he writes something like "They had sex." Because those scenes describe sex acts that are uncomfortable and degrading to one of the participants, but are included because said participant is trying to get from point A to point B, and that's how she pays her way. The author doesn't care to linger over those scenes, and that's fine with me. But the times when the sex is irrelevant? Oh, then we get pages, and the sense that the author typed those sections with one hand.
Why does this bug me? Because for a few of the main characters, and at least two of them are pretty damn important, the only character interaction we get is in the form of sex scenes. The Heroic Starship Captain, a character that the author obviously likes, and seems to want us to like, and maybe identify with, or at least give a damn about, starts off well, but then goes to a space station, has sex, goes on some missions, has sex, goes to a planet, has sex en route, lands on the planet, and has sex. Meanwhile, we get world-building. So much world-building. Yes, I know that I mentioned that before, but it just goes on and on. And sure, it's important to the story, but the author doesn't trust his readers to figure these things out for themselves.
So, why the hell was this book recommended on an sf miniatures gaming list? Because a big thing in this setting is the conflict between humans who use biotechnology and humans who don't. Because it's important, we're informed of this conflict over and over and over...and you know what else? Humans who use biotech have better sex lives than those who don't. Honestly, that's in there. So one branch of humanity has bioships, the other doesn't, and the bioships tend to kick ass. But his descriptions of the ships certainly aren't worth dredging through 588 tedious pages of sex and world-building.
So after slogging through the book, I felt that the author had cheated me out of my time. I had been tempted to quit at the halfway point, but figured that since it was the first of six books, it should get better as it neared the end of the novel and got finished with all the setup stuff. But it just continued to be relentlessly tedious, and ended shortly after yet another breathless, pointless sex scene. And no, none of the sex scenes involved aliens, which might have made it more interesting. Plus, I'm pretty sure that the last sex scene was the third to point out the fact that our intrepid captain's member did a lot of throbbing. Let me just say that the phrase "throbbing cock" is inherently silly, and to use that phrase three times is just juvenile.
So, 588 pages, lots of sex, lots of throbbing, some cardboard characters, an obvious plot, and lots of description of a universe that the author is all hot and bothered about but which he just can't make the reader as excited about, all leading to a resolution the promises to be anticlimactic. Definitely avoid this series, like unto the plague.