Fantastically cynical hard sci-fi, overflowing with ideas. Some of the most memorable are barely relevant to the plot. Themes of first contact, alien lifeforms, body modification, consciousness, communication. Wrapped in a gripping and highly focussed plot. Hope the later books live up to this one. ( )

I read this a long while back so the rating's a bit of a guess and this is just a few general notes but I finished the whole thing in one night reading on a computer screen so I must have enjoyed it. Although iirc I thought the ending was a little anti-climactic, although not really disappointing. Probably scarier if you have a view on human conciousness that sees it as important or even existing at all. The descriptions of stuff like the vampires are cool. It's bleak and dark and the view of the future is pretty interesting and makes you think about stuff but yeah it's super depressing so be warned

But at the same time don't blame me if this sucks haha. It might have been a 3 star book but I definitely remember enjoying it so I doubt you'll be too disappointed if you like that kind of vaguely hard sci fi ( )

If you've ever bemoaned starting from zero with each new book, hearing the same sci fi tropes explained for the hundredth time and just want a book that throws you in the deep end, this is it. With shades of Hyperion and The Expanse, this single book has packed in the world building of a trilogy and expects you to keep up.
Although the book is dense and narratively complex in a rewarding way, it stumbles a bit toward the end and doesn't tie things up in a nice bow. High hopes for the sequel. ( )

I read this book in one sitting without taking any breaks, and well into the night. That's not something I do every day. This novel is great. ( )

40% of the way in, I wanted to go back through my Goodreads account and downgrade all non-DFW or PDK science fiction by at least a star. This is the kind of hard sci-fi that it is impossible (for me) not to love[1], where the chemistry rubber hits the biology road, and one starts poking at edge-cases of both.

The back half, alas, is considerably more conventional, and delves more into philosophical domains on which I have firmer foundation, thus subduing the mania that accompanies new knowledge and instead leaving more time to pull apart the aspects that are less riveting.

To wit: there’s a convention in recent fiction in which action is described as if the geometry should be easy to sketch[2], but because the main character doesn’t understand what is going on, the reader, likewise, can’t understand what is going on. This lack of reader understanding is later rectified by subsequent explanation. The theory, I think, is that the reader is supposed to barrel through the sequence and then be kept in suspense as to what “actually” happened. I really don’t like this convention because it usually takes me several rereads of the offending pages to realize this is an intentional gambit, and not some weird neural misfiring on my part in which I’m just too distracted (or too stupid) to understand words. Since this is a dominant stylistic tic in more fiction from the last ten years than the several centuries before, I’m sure somebody likes it, but it aggravates the hell out of me.

Also, on the philosophical issues, I am at something like the exact opposite end of every one of Watts’ conclusions about consciousness[3]. His militantly utilitarian view of biology and evolution is weirdly small-minded in my estimation, but that is why I’m agnostic, rather than atheist. I’m fundamentally optimistic about the limits of our understanding, and Watts…isn’t.

That said, still the best sci-fi book I’ve read since, maybe Infinite Jest? It just doesn’t break the curve the way I thought it might, early on.

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[1] OK, the vampires are pretty silly, but whatever. The Space Vampire episode of Buck Rogers scared the kittens out of me as an extremely young lad, so…

[2] “Sarasti raised his hands, fading in and out of focus. I hit something, kicked without aiming, bounced away through swirling mist and startled voices. Metal cracked the back of my head and spun me around.”

[3] And I would go so far as to say that if you are looking for what the book is actually about, its driving thesis is that consciousness is not, evolutionarily, all it’s cracked up to be. ( )