Review:
It's very good. It's also surprisingly difficult to read because of the missing resonance of the cultural and historical references. Sure, I know about Marie Curie, but what happens when a character mentions Wu Chien-Shiung "went even further than Marie Curie"? Sure, she went further because she became a physicist after Marie Curie died! Why is she even brought up?
Is that some inherent chinese chauvinism in the original text? I have no idea, but I prefer to take it as an extra opportunity: a novel about alien contact written by a mildly alien writer. Sure, a "real" alien would be much different, in fact it would probably be unintelligible to me. So this is the mild substitute.
I liked it a lot.