The Degan Incident
I liked this book. Kinda.
I think Lyn Gala spoiled me for other SF stories involving humanoid aliens as MCs.
I expected alien culture and/or psychology and/or physiology to be more of a topic. Instead, we get a human with hair overgrowth and sharp teeth. Their world and technology are like Earth's "before we started to build everywhere" (though of course they are more advanced since they can travel in space and all) and they are 99% human in their behavior, so that was a let down.
We get some curious bit of info without any explanations. Like for example, we know Degan males get their tails cut off at birth and females don't - why is that? And for a species that has a pair of huge fangs protruding from their lower jaw they do an awful lot of kissing, the mechanics of which I'm not entirely sure about, especially if there's two Degans kissing. Why don't they have nipples when they are, for all intents and purposes, mammals? Are they all speaking English or do they all have a type of translation software wired in their brains? I wanted to know this stuff and I was left disappointed.
If you ignore the SF elements, the story is kinda okay, but in the end unremarkable.
