Jo Walton:
Designing people and societies: C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen | Tor.com: Cherryh has ruined me for a lot of scifi. I think Heavy Time/Hellburner/Downbelow Station/Cyteen/Forty Thousand in Gehenna read together is a near perfect experience. I love the micro/macro implications to human development and that she stuck with the universe long enough for us as readers to see the payoff for a lot of it. The need to keep the human identity even as people expand out into space. Realizing if you don't make a plan perhaps someday a branch of the human race might come back generations later as alien to you as you are to them...
