Livre d'Or

rysmiel's problem, it wasn't clear how to signal to the reader that the main character's bigoted view of an alien race was non-realistic, when in most similar novels it WOULD be representative of how the aliens really are. But most of the time you can tell.

At that level, it seems that having human characters arguing about how the aliens are made some impact on the problem; the bigger issue of how to get the aliens in as not-funny-shaped-humans-but-genuinely-alien while not making them read as a metaphor for negatively othering subsets of humanity remains one I am wrestling with.

Also, I am charmed with Umberto Eco's remark that Dan Brown is clearly a character who escaped from Foucault's Pendulum into the real world.