I don’t read much sci-fi, but this has been on my to-read shelf for ages, so when yet another friend urged me to pick it up, I finally did, thinking it would be good pre-holiday craziness reading. And sure enough: it’s absolutely gripping, not as much for the prose (though it is plenty effective) as for the sheer power of the central ideas, which are both fascinating and terrifying. In the Afterword, the author writes that he realized that his particular gift as a writer is that “Scales and existences that far exceeded the bounds of human sensory perception — both macro and micro — and that seemed to be only abstract numbers to others, could take on concrete forms in my mind.” This seems exactly right.
I won’t say more, because I think this is one of those books where the less you know, the better, but it’s a really unsettling and ingenious story, intertwining a cool appraisal of the past with a dazzlingly creative hypothesis about the future. It will haunt me for a long time.
Kasia Reads 