Manta's Gift, Timothy Zahn

Way back in 2002, Timothy Zahn wrote Manta's Gift, which begins with a premise familiar to anyone who has seen Avatar (James Cameron, not elemental magic). 

Matt Raimey was 22 when he had his skiing accident, and he was the only tetraplegic crazy enough to accept Project Changeling's offer - to be reborn as a Qanska, the behemoth flying/swimming alien creatures discovered in Jupiter's hurricane winds.

Unknown to Raimey, the project isn't for the purpose of creating new biological treatments for injured people, or even to promote cross-species understanding, but specifically to insert an agent into Qanskan society in order to find out their greatest secret.

I want to start out by saying that I really liked this book, and I really enjoyed the concept.  I need to say that before I start in on the criticisms:

1) The Qanskans are distressingly human.  They have a strict hierarchical society based on tolerable pressures, but despite being TOLD fairly often that they are aliens, they never seem like such - it's the 'bumpy-head' ailment from Star Trek and Star Wars.  Friendships, love, even mentoring relationships all act exactly like they do in mainstream American culture.  I know it's an established way to deal with "alien" cultures when that isn't your real focus, but I really felt that some more effort could have been expended on this, especially given the payout plotline at the end of the book. 

2) If you are 22 years old, and move to a different society, even one where you have to move and speak much differently from normal, even after 8 years, you don't forget your first language and the world you came from, especially if you have people in the back of your mind speaking to you in that language constantly for the first three of those eight years!

If you prefer the new language, that's fine, and if you forget specific terms without having to think hard for them, then ok, but you don't totally forget language and your childhood experiences so thoroughly as the main character did.  I was very taken out of the story when that happened.

3) Maybe I've read too much David Weber, but the hints and teases about the "Five Hundred" and all the things going on back on Mars, Earth, and on the Jupiter space station were a little frustrating.  I would have really liked to have spent more time with the secondary characters, and on the bad guys and their motivations.  I think a contrast between all of that going on, and the totally different conflicts down on/in Jupiter would have been really nifty.  Actually, I think I have read too much David Weber. 

That's all of the critical stuff.

Specific likes:

I actually liked an epilogue for once!  Yay! 

Arbiter Liadof was an awesome bad guy.  I liked her a lot, and really wished we could have gotten more of her.

Farraday and his team were extremely interesting, as was the concept of the Jupiter Prime station and the various projects and turf-wars going on up there as a result of politics and demagoguery.  Again, really wished to see more of that.

I liked the explanation late in the story that revealed the Qanskan reasoning for allowing this "half-breed" birth into their society - it was one of the few times they were shown as having truly alien thoughts and lives.  I liked that they recognized that as a species.

I really liked the central conceit (the secret) of the story.  That was an interesting concept, and one that would be fun to follow up on, especially considering the epilogue.

Overall, a nifty read!