traciloudin

Pronouns are a difficult part of the language to change, say the linguists. Nouns, easy. Verbs, easy enough. It took me a little while to get used to ve/vis/ver, but I eventually got the hang of it. But that was only the beginning. I would suggest that to read this book you need to be very adept at quickly learning language. The overwhelming number of new terms and ideas made this book challenging, but I accepted that particular challenge.

This book begins with the formation of identity itself. It was fascinating, watching how human-like minds are created in a transhuman world. The machine smashes together hundreds of variables to create a new person. Once I got over all the new terms, I enjoyed this part. I found myself telling other scifi readers about it.

But from there, the plot completely disappears. This new identity, Yatima, goes to chat with a character that was never mentioned before and isn't introduced at all... about a math problem, essentially. It's random and seemingly pointless. The characters seem to have very little motivation to do much of anything because of their transhuman nature. This was odd to me, because the synopsis I read on Kindle sounded promising.

After sticking with it a little while longer, I found I could never distinguish between different types of people, whether they were in cyberspace or meatspace (or if there's even a difference in this universe), and how they got from place to place.

With a million different terms, a lack of clear plot direction in the beginning, and a missing setting, I gave up on this book.

So I suppose you'll need to be a HUGE lover of hard science fiction to really latch on to this book. And you'll really need to love math. This book is all about the idea, and leaves everything else behind.

You guys know I love scifi, but I need concrete characters, plot, and setting to grab me. This book had none of the above. I wonder if this is what regular scifi feels like to non-scifi readers.