advance in exchange for the promise never to kill other sentient creatures, most of the population of Earth accepted and left the planet. Those who remained were those who wouldn't, or couldn't accept the League's offer. As Earth's population departed, the planet descended into chaos. The book takes place about 400 years after this great exodus, and while some technology still exists, most has fallen in ruin. Tober Cove is a small, rural, technologically undeveloped town that is unique in the galaxy. Spark Lords rule Earth with super-advanced technology. Clad in indestructible armor, with access to the galaxy's latest gadgetry, Spark Lords maintain absolute control over Earth. Charged by the League with maintaining law and order on Earth, they content themselves with preventing major conflicts. They generally stay out of local affairs, and, to the knowledge of Cove residents, no Spark Lord has ever visited Tober Cove. Much of the plot of the novel is driven by the arrival in Tober Cove of the Science Spark Lord to observe the gender-changing ceremony. Reception At Tor.com, Jo Walton declared that the best thing about the novel was Fullin's voice, which she described as "confident confiding first person"; she also stated that the most interesting thing was Fullin's belief "that he's living in a low tech fantasy world, full of gods and magic and rituals and taboos, when in fact it's quite clear to the reader as the story goes on that this is a post-technological, indeed, post-singularity society", and emphasized that the culture of Tober Cove is "very sophisticated" and "very Canadian". The SF Site's Donna McMahon considered it to be "engaging, entertaining, funny and very well written", faulting it only in that she found it unlikely that, "in a society with very rigid traditional gender roles, the sex ratio would end up around 50-50 even if each person was given a completely free choice" — and in that she felt Gardner "has never lived in a fishing village" and therefore "didn't capture the feel of a fish-guts-stinking rural subsistence economy". Conversely, at Quill and Quire, Crawford Kilian compared it negatively to Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, judging Fullin to be "a stock character who speaks in a flat colloquial style that evokes 1990s suburban America", and the society of Tober Cove to be "crude and implausible"; Publishers Weekly likewise felt that Gardner "lacks the finesse of Le