I kept finding so many little problems with the book, yet I kept reading and liking it. Perhaps my expectations (based on his interview on the Ezra Klein podcast) were too high. But the human characters were hard to relate to, the relationships between them flat and mechanical. It’s like he spent more time developing the spiders than the humans. Twenty-year-old me would’ve been a-okay with that, today’s me felt a little disappointed but is still planning to read the next book.

The science was ... inadequate. He tried really hard, though! A+ for effort, B- for accuracy. B- overall, that is: Some aspects -- mind uploading; technology adaptation/innovation/maintenance on a millennial starship -- were D-worthy at best, and there were countless “sigh... it Does Not Work That Way” moments, but the vast majority of the science is plausible and intriguing. I tamed my eyeroll response and feel that, taken all together, this was worth it. Tchaikovsky’s heart is absolutely in the right place: he explores Big Questions worth exploring, and has developed a really promising, clever, sciencefiction-y universe.