It's finally over, and what a long strange trip it's been.

You know what the length and pacing of this book reminded me of? Hours of level grinding in an old-school RPG to beat a boss that totally trashed me the first time I tried him, only to discover there's a wicked simple and quick strategy to win without power-levelling. This book was dragged out for almost no reason. Seriously, it's good to plan out a story a bit, maybe storyboard it a little, but this was too much. My advice to Vinge would be to flesh out the characters deeply before even starting the story, and then plug them into a setting and writing the story based on how the characters interact, it's that simple.
The humans were shallowly made, but the spiders, while more deeply developed, were just odd. Star Trek has shown us that we can make aliens easily be slapping weird clothes and make-up on a human and having them not get along with the "real" humans and somehow they got away with that, but the spiders were too close to being like humans to be believable despite what Star Trek did.
Now the story is over, and the ending was reasonably satisfying. Mostly it was because of what happened to the Emergents and how I love to see the bad guys suffer, but also because of the nice hook up between two important Qeng Ho, who shall remain nameless to avoid spoilers. It didn't really surprise me that they ended up that way, after all is it not normal for a teenage girl to endlessly pester the older guy that she has a crush on? Oops, said too much, must go now.