A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought, #1)

Difficult to rate. I can see why this won the Hugo. 5⭐ for ideas. The problem is that there's too many ideas for the book. For me, exploring either the [spoilers removed] or the [spoilers removed] would been enough. Both was too much. Especially when for the latter, the concepts were so huge and varied. As the story progressed, we were barely introduced to a concept when there was a shift–some anomaly that shook the characters. And I guess us, but it's hard to be shook when you don't know what is actually surprising.
Anyhow, I think all this squoze out room for plot and characters. Both lacked quite a lot, I thought, so that coming back to the book was kind of a drag. I thought this was going to drag the book down to 4 stars for me, but when I got to the end of the story and found there was a medium-lengthy epilogue, my heart sank.