I had started this book as a bathtub book - ie a book I read in short bursts on my kindle while my daughter is trying to eat the bubbles in a bubble bath - but it turns out that it's the kind of book that needs to be read in one long go. It's a great travel book and so I finally finished it over winter vacation.
The thing about novellas is that they are amazing for world building. Because no one expects 45 pages of info dump, you can just charge straight in and haul the reader along for the ride. Some of the most fascinating worlds I've visited this year have been in novellas and I'm convinced that part of why they are so compelling is the constraint of the genre - you can't explain everything and so the text takes on a certain verisimilitude because you can't know everything and have everything explained IRL either (though God knows some of us do try).
Yang's characters are snapshots of an identity moving through the Tensorate, but it is the Tensorate itself with its revolutions and magic and rising technological prowess that is the star of the show.
Having said that, I thought Akeha was an excellent main character and I cared deeply about his choices and path through life. The care with which Yang constructs the Tensorate depends on having a main character worth following through it.