A word about bêtes: in so relentlessly English a novel, in which an outside world is scarcely even mentioned, it is never explained why a French word should be chosen to identify the talking animals. It makes them foreign, alien, but in a work that has more wordplay, puns and malapropisms even than is usual in an Adam Roberts novel, we have to take note of things like this. I suspect, therefore, that we are intended to hear an echo of ‘bet’ in the word, the novel details a huge gamble about the nature of consciousness and the future of humanity.

Paul Kincaid

The same with editors–my editors at Orbit didn’t ask me to change the pronouns at all. It was, rather, one of the things they’d really liked about the novel. […] My takeaway from the whole experience is that laundry lists of what’s “commercial” or not aren’t actually terribly helpful, not in and of themselves. I am not a fan of aspiring writers worrying too much about whether their work is commercial or not, not because I have any sort of disdain for the commercial (I like to sell books as much as the next person!) but because what sells or doesn’t isn’t really that easily predictable.

Ann Leckie