This book frames its speculations well within the bounds of science fiction, obviously, but I found my own speculations about the book to extend beyond the basic notion of what ways we might come into contact with other intelligence. I find the concept of other expressions or modes of intelligence to be an interesting topic which was underlined by the themes of this book. It also directly deals with the ways in which people in extreme, isolated conditions are able to interact and deal with encroaching madness. That's a good subject, too; actually, I found it to be more of a psychological novel than a sci-fi one, though I do agree with Rebekah above in that my only complaint is that the science parts got rather thick and perhaps over-considered.

My favorite aspect of the book is a part where (and I finished it last month so I'm badly paraphrasing) one of the characters described the phenomena they were experiencing on board the station in terms of the colloid ocean merely going through gestures as well as it could, in attempt to approach or interact with the visiting aliens (humans). The example was made, that if humans had learned to mimic the various phenomena presented by the ocean, they wouldn't know why they were doing it or what effect it would have. This fairly well summed up all the ambiguity inherent in two varied and advanced intelligences attempting to communicate with each other, the way I saw it. In some ways I guess you could see this difficulty of communication repeated in the microcosm of the station as well, in the paranoid behavior of the main characters.

I don't know, just my impressions. I thought it was a really fascinating read, even in its overall ambiguity.