This book is so into extrapolating from the specifics of when it was written that it feels outdated even two years later. Twitter still existing? Laughable. People still caring about COVID? Naïve. I suppose that's the wages of writing a light sci-fi novel at a huge inflection point in the entire world.

The politics in this feel similarly sketchy. It starts out heavily focused on the depredations of China, something that feels uncomfortably aligned with bellicose US propaganda of the actual world, and then throws in "oh India is doing some shady stuff too" at the end which doesn't really help at all. Naturally the Europeans and Americans come out smelling mostly of roses.

At a large scale, this feels like it's chasing the coattails of The Ministry for the Future and just making an ass of itself in the process.