Rating: 
Summary: Very Interesting
Review: "Metaplanetary" is an interesting book with great ideas and action. Although the beginning of the book doesn't make too much sense, once the explanations for all of the high-tech stuff get going, things become cool. The concepts of "grist," the Met, and "cloudships" are very interesting. I have heard that this book is the first of a series describing the war between the inner worlds (Interlocking Directorates) and the outer worlds (the Republic) and there are hints in the book of more to come. I hope that Mr. Daniel does write a sequel; a series based on his ideas would be excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent.
Review: After reading Daniel's short story "A Dry, Quiet War", and then his novella/story/thing "Grist", I was pretty keyed up waiting for this book. With high hopes and a light heart I ordered it the first day it was available...And wasn't at all disappointed! I think this is probably one of the 10 best sci-fi books I've read.
Rating: 
Summary: Mysteryplanetary
Review: Although Mr. Daniel is an imaginative Sci-Fi writer and seems knowledgeable about the hard science aspects of his story, there are things that make this book unsatisfactory. The most disturbing of these is that it isn't pointed out anywhere to the buyer that this is actually an unfinished book. Several important subplots are introduced and then abandoned by the end of the narrative. It's as frustrating as a detective mystery in which you are not told "who done it." Also, the writer haphazardly jumps around among many different characters and you find yourself having to continually flip back through the book to refresh your memory about who this person was.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: An excellent novel. One of the most compelling and original sci-fi novels I've ever read in a long time. I especially loved the concepts that are presented. This I believe will become a classic along the lines of Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury and Heinlein.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Surprise
Review: An excellent story with some novel (no pun intended) approaches to the space opera genre. Tony Daniel had combined human elements with some fun and interesting scientific principles. This story kicks off a solar-system-wide civil war in a universe where the planets are physically linked together into the "Met".
The entire Met, including the connecting "cables" is populated with multiple billions of people whose lives are in turn interconnected through the nano-quantum material called "grist". Humanity has branched out into various forms including Free Converts - Virtual bodiless people, LAP's - Large Array of Personalities, Cloudships - living comets (for lack of better word) and of course biological humans who are fully integrated with their own convert (virtual) copies as well as the assisting grist pellicle that connects them to the physical and virtual world that dominates the Met.
With characters spread around the solar system, Tony Daniel brings to life a world of intelligent ferrets, mystics, dictators and lovers. Reminiscent of Peter Hamilton and Robert Heinlein, Mr. Daniel brings us a strange new world with fascinating characters and an interesting and plausible storyline. I fully enjoyed this book and recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: original mindbender
Review: An original (hard to find nowadays) enviroment to place a good story. Good Sci-Fi is like any other genre. You must have characters to care about and an evironment that is stimulating. Metaplanetary provides both.
Rating: 
Summary: A dull, ordinary book, and it doesn't even have an ending!
Review: Be warned: Metaplanetary is not a complete story. Indeed, it's 437 pages of prologue to what seems like it will be a much larger story chronicling the struggle between Ames, the Director of the inner solar system (the "Met"), and the free-wheeling inhabitants of the outer system. Even putting aside the completely unexpected lack-of-an-ending (hardly any of the plot's threads are resolved), this would be a fairly decent premise if the rest of the book didn't alternate between silly and boring. The "boring" part is the real indictment here: The characters are almost wafer-thin, their only real traits being the occasional rebellious or happy-go-lucky streak. But they're really all pretty generic individuals, and Daniel's prose sticks to a very distant third person tone, so we never really get inside their heads to know what they're thinking or feeling. It's like reading a skimpy biography, complete (alas) with lengthy and ponderous descriptions of their early lives. I stopped caring about any of the characters midway through the book. But then, Daniel was still introducing significant new characters in the book's final quarter, so maybe he'd stopped caring about them as well. Daniel's prose has this wry, don't-take-anything-too-seriously tone which also colored Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. I found it hard to take there, and it's insufferable here, undercutting the serious elements of the book (concentration camps for sentient computer programs!). I guess some of the off-handed one liners are supposed to be funny, but they generally felt forced to me. Lastly, there's the "science". This is usually pedestrian: Sentient computer programs, cyberspace, really big sentient spaceships (to bring in the Iain Banks readers, I guess), minds with more than one body (the most interesting element in the book, the way Daniel presents it, but it gets so little screen time its potential is squandered). The supposed coolness of this is further buried under the relatively mundane lives of the large cast of characters. The grandest scientifictional idea in Metaplanetary is the Met itself: A network of superstrong cables connecting the Mercury/Venus/Earth/Mars orbits. Aside from the fundamental implausibility of this network, I kept asking myself what this system gains them. How is travelling by Met cable better than using a ship? How is using it for communication better than using wireless networks? Isn't it a huge capital investment for little apparent payoff? Overall, Metaplanetary might have been a pretty cool novel back in the 1950s, but it feels dated and tedious today. Spend your reading time elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Here We Go Again
Review: Do we need another "universe?" I think it's time to rename the whole genre - SciFi has become ScamFi. Why do I get the feeling that these authors have no intention of ever telling a coherent story again; that all they want to do is create a "universe" where they can earn a few bucks by putting out another chapter in a never-ending story every couple of years. This book started out well-enough, but my dense mind caught on to the fact that the plot wasn't going to be resolved at about page 300 (out of over 400). There were just too many loose ends, with not enough pages remaing to tie them all up. Science fiction used to be fun and intriguing. Now, thanks to books and authors such as this, it is only plodding and pointless. Have we as an audience really become so unsophisticated?
Rating:
Summary: An excellent sci-fi high tech novel
Review: Even though I tend to lean more toward the more standardized sci-fi or space opera type of books, from the Old Masters to the New: "Stranger in a Strange Land", "Puppet Masters", "Foundation", "2001", "2010", "Rendezvous with Rama", "Ringworld", all the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" books, "Advent of the Corps" and others.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent sci-fi high tech novel
Review: Even though I tend to lean more toward the more standardized sci-fi or space opera type of books, from the Old Masters to the New: "Stranger in a Strange Land", "Puppet Masters", "Foundation", "2001", "2010", "Rendezvous with Rama", "Ringworld", all the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" books, "Advent of the Corps" and others.
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