I think the most recent novel I got blurbed into was Karl Schroeder's Ventus, with Vernor Vinge saying it was ``a milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems.'' That worked because I respect Vinge a great deal, distributed systems are something I know he knows about, and his earlier blurbs were mostly for good stuff. Of course, none of that's enough if the story inside doesn't look interesting -- it just got me to take a peek, which I'm glad it did.

(Hi, by the way... I enjoyed Emerald House Rising.)