I ripped through it yesterday in a few hours’ time. It was so… flimsy? Like more of a too-long short story or merely an outline of an idea? It was as if Mandel just had to get something, anything to the publisher to fulfill a contract real quick. The author character made me never ever want to write a book. The characters had no depth, the concepts weren’t fleshed out, and the vision of the future wasn’t credible to me. What did everyone else think?
It felt like Mandel didn’t actually respect science fiction as a genre. She writes it like she’s too good to actually learn from and engage with writing that other authors have already done. Her time travel mechanics are super flimsy, but they aren’t even flimsy for thematic reasons. It was just laziness. She barely understands Simulation Theory herself, and she does a poor job of presenting it before making it the central theme of the novel. Mandel writes like she’s a true “literary” author and found herself fucking up a genre story that could’ve been something passable with a modicum of respect for sci-fi.