This was a pain to actually acquire, but well worth reading. The writing was eccentric, but I enjoyed it, the lack of strong gender markers was a welcome change (and blessedly didn't make the writing feel at all strained), and it's also a very rare and very pleasant thing to read about what is so clearly a crapsack work improving (at least locally), and seeing freedom and cooperation win out over brutal oppression - there's a distinct lack of this in much recent SF&F, although Alastair Reynolds' enjoyable, but non-awesome novel Terminal World has a similar feel. In any case, thanks for mentioning this, I doubt I would have encountered it otherwise.