Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 3/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 4/5 
 What an interesting read. This was one of those puzzle-piece books for me that linked predecessors and ancestors in just the right way to give a new picture of the science fiction genre. 
 This had an excellent opening chapter. It was well-written, with vivid descriptions and thoughtful turns of phrase. It was well-paced, slow and subtle with world-building of a very different and intriguing future. It even had impressive character development, containing mysteries and depth with forthcoming answers implied. I'm not familiar enough with the publishing history to be sure, but I suspect that first chapter was written before the rest and is what got Dickson published in Astounding Science Fiction. As the book progressed the prose turned bland, the pacing raced ahead, and character development reached a premature peak. There were so many ideas with tremendous promise (view spoiler)[genetics, "oddity," specialization, and contracts (hide spoiler)] and finespun allegories(view spoiler)[comparative advantage, mercantilism, the United Nations (hide spoiler)], but the nuance and attentiveness so obvious in the first half of the book had disappeared by the second. My guess would be that the author had to meet both deadlines and the expectations of his science fiction fan-base, so it settled into a much-easier-to-write pulp science fiction story. 
 One can see the impact of a science fiction forefather on Dickson (view spoiler)[specifically, Asimov and the concept of psychohistory from the Foundation universe (hide spoiler)]. I was hopeful that Dickson was going to build on that and turn the ideas into something even more monumental, but the development of those ideas fell prey to the same decline and haste as the rest of the novel. Perhaps more impressively, I had not realized how much this book must have impacted later writers and genre classics (view spoiler)[Dune is the most obvious. There are so many ideas here that would later be integrated by Herbert. It is also clear now where Orson Scott Card got his inspiration for Ender. (hide spoiler)]. I'm not sure if this is the origin of the term "jump" in regards to FTL travel, but the description of how this worked was taken up almost intact later (view spoiler)[by C.J. Cherryh (hide spoiler)]. 
 If I had read this when it was originally published in 1959, I probably would have thought it the greatest science fiction ever written. Other authors, also undoubtedly impressed, saw the great strengths and numerous flaws, and the next couple of decades produced many science fiction works that built on and bettered what Dickson started. Today one could easily skip this because it has been mined of all its ideas. I'll go on to read another of the Childe cycle though to see if Dickson and the series matures beyond pulp.