Radically different from other books in the series, this book is basically an extended meditation on Descartes’ “brain in a vat” thought experiment, but it’s Tchaikovsky, so of course there are aliens involved, as well as humans fighting desperately to survive. One interesting aspect of this is the inclusion of the entities previously established in the series: sentient spiders and octopi, as well as a very opinionated and extremely old AI. The book starts out straightforward, but then seems to jump in time and branch into various scenarios, which starts to clue the reader into the fact that something is obviously going awry. I liked it quite a lot as a standalone thought experiment, but I don’t think it actually moved the series forward as much, in the long run, as the previous books did.
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