This short novel takes a cool concept and attempts to make a story out of it. For me there wasn’t quite enough here to make this a great story, but I give it high marks for potential.
The best part of this book is that it introduces this distant planet inhabited by long abandoned colonists that have restarted a civilization, with one “modern” anthropologist in cryogenic suspension awakened occasionally. This book throws together the modern with the primitive and allows the reader to see events unfold from both perspectives. It is sort of a gimmick that works to an extent – I’d have liked to see it explored a bit more.
The world building here is excellent. Tchaikovsky has a great sense of scale in science fiction – beyond the day to day he also shows generational shifts over a very long time. All the background info that he packed in here had me begging for more details, more development, more exploration. Instead it seemed like he was trying to wrap up the book as soon as possible. Maybe he has other things he wants to get to.
I’m not sure I’ve read anything like this – the barebones of a story draped over a rich universe of lore, ideas and background information that are pretty much left untouched. Hopefully the writer will come back to this at some point and expand it.
Next I am reading Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne.
