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?
I went into this book pretty much blind but with positive expectations. It just never gave me anything to care about. Engaging vibes and evocative prose was nowhere to be found. The characters all were weakly written. Everyone felt guided by the invisible plot hand in order to serve the narrative without any real desires of agency of their own. Which might be forgivable if the plot itself was something special, but it wasn’t. We spent so much effort jumping around between people, space, and time. After reading the final payoff tying everything together, my only thought was “huh, why do I care about any of this?”