It's got some provocative ideas, which Stephen foregrounds.
It's got a great hook, and like most writing incubated under circumstances like this, it leans hard into polished sharp introduction into a well-considered world with a very specific flavor.
It's also—no better way to put it—crappy as a novel.
It's not because the author can't string sentences together.
It's because that's not what makes a novel function as a novel.
Epic opening and premise establishment: 10/10
Nice "plot twist", predictable in its inevitability if not its specifics; conforms to genre: 7/10
Narrative arc: 2/10
Ability to sustain meaningful tension and interest while working through the de rigeur mechanics of filling hundreds of pages: 1/10
I get that there is a new readership with different expectations and styles of reading. (Looking at you tiktok; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl; looking at most successful YA fiction especially that which gets SPICEY and is released in 8-book series with a new volume every 11 months)
If you're silverback and relish long-form fiction as previously conceived: set expectations accordingly.
I am a "silverback" and have read all of the classics of the SciFi genre and I loved this novel. An unconventional topic like this isn't going to fit all of the norms of writing. I thought it was well written and I love his dialog. I'm looking forward to future work.
Yeah, it's trying to cohere the structure of the book with the topic matter which I really appreciate. It doesn't always quite land, but I think it was really worthwhile. Although I can understand how someone who is looking for a "normal" novel might be dissatisfied. But to me it's a bit like house of leaves, you need to accept the meta-conceit of the book being subject to the effect of its contents.
As someone who has a low opinion of House of Leaves,
and was e.g. entirely immune to the charms of Twin Peaks,
I believe you're right.
But even then... once this devolved into what felt like a teeth-clenching march to the Final Battle, on the basis AFAI can tell that this is what the author understood Novels Must Do,
it wasn't even providing the pleasures you get from just floating along.
A fun way to look at this is that the "long head" (ramp) of the singularity began some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We're just living in teh exciting bit.
Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.
The disagreements ITT at least answer the question I came away with after scanning this post—"if these are almost all pronounced the same, why the different diacriticals?"
The partial answer being, some dialects retain differences and they are significant. My own accent is not terrible especially for an American raised when and where I was, but I internalized it early enough (just through middle school instruction, sadly) that I don't even know if I pronounce them all the same... I'd have to read some passages and inspect.
But I was hoping for a little more by way of explicit discussion of the why, which I infer is largely: diacriticals are mostly artifacts of etymology which at some point became ossified and absent a Dudens-like change in prescriptive heart, are here to stay, mostly unvoiced indicators of language evolution (like the silent k and gh in English knight).
Fellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW.
This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding.
The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it might have required earnest effort.
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