I bought Valuable Humans in Transit after enjoying Ra, despite my misgivings about the shortness of the book (101 pages). I should have listened to my misgivings in this case. The book has a bunch of short stories, but each story is focused entirely on expositing an idea or concept. There's no character development, and the stories frequently end with a reveal. There's no plot or resolution, so many stories leave you frequently unsatisfied. Some of the stories are written in twitter format, or in the form of IM, some are written like Wikipedia articles. You get the impression of a writer experimenting with different formats and concepts and ways of telling a story, but at no point do you get the impression that the writer actually matured to the point where he had refined an idea or story to the point of it being actually good.
If you like his ideas, great. But as many writers have said, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that matters. In this case the execution isn't great.
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