Reviews and Comments

this could be so much fun to read if for a moment the author'd forget his obsession with evolution as a clear progression towards (potentially godlike) intelligence …

(also he's eaten Hobbes whole, but I feel that's kinda on par with most "hard" sci-fi written by men. for some reason they like their philosophies nasty, brutish, and ~~short~~ english 🫠)

… now I kinda wonder how much this specific book has influenced current robotgirl / "this unit"-communities

Fun to read, but you can kinda see the gears of the story turning in the background (as in, it's not got much depth to it). To be read similar to The Martian: fun "hard" science fiction, not queer or interested in social implications at all, and the parts on earth are best read as necessary background knowledge to make the rest of it work and nothing else (and unfortunately that framing device worked less well for me here than it did in The Martian)

Other than that, it's fun! Made for very good escapist reading when I needed that, so,

rereading this, mostly since there wasn't much else on hand

this is pretty easy to read fast, and it's good, too, but i miss the density of other books — feels like it reads fast because there's less stuff packed into each sentence than there could be

i think i'm too overwhelmed to really write anything about this book rn, it's too much. spätestens ab der hälfte war ich auch nicht mehr wirklich ausreichend aufnahmefähig (there is so, so much going on in this text, and my memory not nearly good enough to keep all strands in my head at once)

this is probably the only sci-fi work i have ever read which has a solid page of text entirely in latin (and then has the gall to make that horribly weird latin, since most of it was presumably added three-words-a-time over centuries, for complicated in-universe regions)

where's my mycroft :/

This book has been recommended by an uncommonly disperate set of people; curious to see what that is about

as already mentioned, this book is just so much

found this lying around on the street & thought it might be interesting

annoyingly, this book is still in the category of "almost everything i could possibly say about it has at least essay-length", and i don't have the time or motivation to write essays 🙈

a fun side observation tho: it moves slowly, not in the sense that i'm on page 155 and it's barely evening of the second day described, but in that reappearing characters usually reappear exactly where they were left before the narration switched focus on someplace else, and there are absolutely no "they did $things in the meantime"-passages anywhere — everything is part of the main trunk of the narration grinding along at dizzying (but slow) speeds, without ever taking a moment for breath (while Mycroft repeatedly hits you on the head with the entire canon of 'western' philosophy, and being unnecessarily horny about it all)

Haven't read much so far, but god have i missed Mycroft's voice, he's so absurdly, obnoxiously, incomprehensibly derangend in absolutely every word he writes; i keep having fun imagining what one of his actual readers would think, since he's explicitly writing this for publication soon after the events he's describing

(i'm kinda anxious about how much i like i'll like these books this time overall though — been years since i read this, and i might disagree with Ada more now than I did before, but we'll see)