This might just be my favourite book in the series. From start to finish we had a wonderful setup with a 30 million person station full of hungry anarchists (sorry, i mean adherents of democracy), crazies with antimatter annihilation factories, and the all-time best robotic hero and pallet-master, The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. It had all the best elements of a heroic story, right down to a capital-class starship bouncing around like a pinball inside an extra-large Rama city and a classic stare into the abyss cinematic.

The whole story was smooth as ice-cream and just as delicious. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1459373.html

Longshoreman of the Apocalypse made slightly more sense than The Body Politic, but that's not saying much, and I still found it not very funny; I guess I know too much about military escorts for humanitarian aid for a story based on the humorous ways people can get killed horribly in such an enterprise to appeal to me, and also the eponymous longshoreman turns out to be an anthropomorphic robot which, though not especially cute, like to be called Lota - it's an acronym, see? - and so pushes one of my buttons. ( )