Apparently a Nebula Award-winning author, I’d not heard of Robert Metzger before. The back cover of CUSP certainly has an astounding list of blurbists: David Brin, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Robert J. Sawyer, each touting it as hard scifi. CUSP starts out as a near-future hard scifi story, but it quickly enters what I’d call fairy-tale land. And to top it off, it has a non-ending ending. If it hadn’t been the only book with me on a short trip, I’m not sure I would have finished it.