I had been looking forward to reading this James Tiptree Award winner, recommended by many of you, and started off very much enjoying the well-constructed future Earth of the story – the decayed America, the peculiar infections, the African setting for many of the chapters, the aliens who are more than human and less than human in various ways, the central character who is a newsblogger avant la lettre. But I didn’t quite feel that the plot then did much with this promising elements. Perhaps it’s just that I got to it towards the end of a long plane flight, but I also remember having much the same reaction to Bold As Love.