very charmed by the formal ambition without any of the markers of formal ambition. on most levels it reads as pretty good youngadult sff. on the sentence level its readable before anything else, gaea is perfectly in line with ya i-have-good-politics-but-this-is-too-silly-to-be-allegorical-and-taken-too-seriously-to-be-satirical dystopia with a childsoldier protagonist to match, most anything subtle is eventually highlighted, spelled out, tied up with a bow. the author is clearly familiar with fascist/cult case studies but isnt so much 'really say[ing] something about society' as it were but leveraging that familiarity for a certain kind of authenticity.

theres a severely unreliable narrator at first whose major flaw is stubbornly not noticing or thinking about certain things but everything gets cleared up. for any political and philosophical problems it might have spoken to with any finesse, it instead opts for diegetic epigraphs that guide the reader through its themes like classroom discussion prompts. the author brings in an omnipotent governing superintelligence without risking any real conversation with a canon that could get arbitrarily highbrow esoteric or technical (philosophy, theology, political science, ai risk). the title is from one of the most famous lines of english poetry, which gets referenced again in-universe in case you missed it.

and then the first 50% of the book gets tossed out! it never happened. those guys never died. they never existed! its too funny. (they come back but it still never happened.) and with the slightest exception of the paired epigraphs at the beginning contradicting each other there's no trace of irony or knowingness, selfconsciousness or coyness in the whole thing. [not true, gaea adopts 'sweet and meet' as a motto.]

theres a brief cameo of a historian and a journalist but without any of the standard signposts or so much as a wink at the reader. theres no suggestion that its societies' media are in any sense symmetrically propagandist.

the agoge [almost stopping the apocalypse as training scenario] is the same technology as the world-resetting tech [actually stopping the apocalypse] but this is a purely horizontal (skillful!) parallel. theres no hint that 'those 20 trillion people didnt die' in the narrative or has anything to do with the way they didnt die in real life, or that the characters experiences and deaths are just as real in the readers minds whether or not the author takes it back, or 'those 14 billion people died thousands of times in your simulations, or maybe im just saying that because im a jerk' is looking directly into the camera etc. its just the 'time loop' trope applied to an entire novelsworth of a loop, dont overthink it! [there's only one real restart but the character who remembers things goes ahead and asks 'which loop is this' for some reason.]

love it, pulled off without a hitch, extra 0.5 stars, now wishing for more outrageous tricks plied to youngadult ends.