This one was.. different. Not super spaced out hard sci-fi like most of Egan's work, but quite down to Earth and essentially near future. I was worried this may turn out to be another one of Egan's works I didn't like: Teranesia. I found it too close to home and too far away from Egan's wheelhouse. Happy that these first impressions were wrong.

The story is primarily set in Iran and steeped quite deep in Iranian culture, which for those not versed in it could be considered other-worldly enough to learn about customs and history, both of which Egan may have done really well throughout his own story telling. Maybe - I don't know. But compelling enough for me to hunt some of it down.

The science part of this fiction concerns digital brain analogues essentially. Not mind uploading, but some form of precursor synthetic mind. In general, the exploration concerning this topic in the book was interesting, but I think that there were perhaps two directions tugging on Egan here: the tech and the cultural. Generally he manages this quite flawlessly, although here his focus was definitely more on the culture (he states this explicitly in the afterward actually). To that end, I can't really say much more than I liked this book. It was good, just not great in the sense that many of Egan's works are.