Three hundred years in the future, a devastated world is populated with Centaurs, Vampires, and other results of genetic engineering, and Humans are just one minority group. The Human Josh and his Centaur friend Beauty have their homes destroyed, and their wives abducted. So they set out on a mission to recover them.
The quest structure is fairly standard way of giving a guided tour of the weird world. And that world is potentially interesting, if one discounts the over-simplistic premiss of genetic engineering being able to produce griffins by taking genes for lions' bodies and for eagles' wings, and combining them. However, I found the prose so leaden and plodding, and the characters so flat, that I gave up about a third of the way through. I had about as much interest in finding the abductees as the protagonists seemed to.
A friend bought me this copy, purely because of the title, which is a phrase I use frequently when lamenting the sheer volume of amount of interesting stuff there is to find out about. Despite my opinion of the book's contents, I appreciate the thought behind the gift.
