Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Not worth the time

Having never read any of Tracy Hickman's work before, I opened my copy of The Immortals hoping to find taut, mature science fiction - the cover does brag that he is a "NY Times Best Selling Author" after all. Instead, I got a slapdash attempt to be politically correct (look! I like gay people! I really really like gay people!), literarily descriptive (start playing a drinking game with the number of references to eye color), and intellectually beyond the confines of 'mere' religion (The one bad guy calls himself "Reverend," the other spouts a sort of doomsday social Darwinism).Given that this book was written in 1996, I'll cut him some slack for rehashing such tired tropes. But even so, the writing is generally uneven, moving from clever bits of description to overly maudlin efforts to poke at the reader's tear ducts, and he can't seem to figure out how to work exposition seamlessly into the rest of the story. There is much better science fiction than this.