So the foreword alone was enough to get my juices flowing. It was a name-drop of epic proportions, throwing around high-octane concepts in coding and linguistics whilst absolutely not being stingy with the philosophy and literature. A weird, yet surprisingly apposite gestalt, as you will see when you get further into the book than the opening chapter. The foreword was also inscribed from Colombo, which rang an Arthur C. Clarke bell in my head for some reason.

I took a little while to settle to the pace of the narrative, perhaps in part because our OC is quite the fast-talker. There’s also a fascinating dichotomy between the overseer’s care for each individual crew member and the speed with which they die, and couple that with the time and tech being further from Sol than I’d planned maybe meant I needed to adjust for a while.

Of course, things start to happen. The pace picks up, if that’s possible, and you end up with a seemingly impossible pastiche of hauntingly-beautiful poetry, dinosaur-sized megafauna and deadly micromachines. I won’t spoil the end, but I loved Shen, and things start going south rapidly after the poor Replicant gets itself into trouble.

The ending, now that was rather good. I wondered what would happen, which is a nice change of pace from either “all is good, everyone’s fine” or “oh, they’re all dead”. Explosive and climactic in several senses of the word, I must confess to slightly overextending my lunch break because I was on chapter 40 and wanted to know how things would pan out.

So for me, a slow starter, but a proper gripping, thrilling burner of a story when it got going. Bring on more, I say! More!