Weird book. A very much product of its times, for all its portrayal of the year 2050. Shows you how wrong you can go blindly extrapolating current trends into the far future. Trends rarely last long enough for those predictions to come true, as has been the case here.

Once you strip out all that, I'm not sure how much remains. The theme of religion versus science has been handled much more interestingly in the Hyperion/Endymion series by Simmons, so once you strip that out too, the one thing you're left with is basically huge bees. Not a bad thing, but hardly enough to win a Hugo by. Then again, we've seen in recent years how worthless these awards are (Harry Potter, anyone?).