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Don't do it.

I'll be dead in thirty years. I might have a couple of hundred books left in me, at best, and this was one of them. I feel bitter about that.

That's quite an achievement for a book whose politics I basically share. Taylor and Klein write for a reader who has just arrived from another planet, or who has spent the last twenty years in a coma. Each chapter is a series of loosely linked stories and cases, and anyone who has been paying attention, or who has just been online, will know almost all of them already. The people who will pick up a book with this title are the people who already know all of this. I don't know who they're imagining they're explaining it all to.

There's no analysis, no argument and no synthesis. By the final chapter I still felt it wasn't building to anything. It's a polemic, and a frankly stupid one. It's my fault for breaking my own rule to never read another book by a journalist or columnist.

North gives you a detailed vocab but not really glossary. The Shine, arcspace, the Slow. You end up working it out, but it’s more disorienting than usual and it helps with world building.

The technology gets the same treatment and I think that’s where many readers will give up on this. What the Slow actually is, what happened to the narrator at the moments that determined the course his life, etc.; none of it is really ever explained. The narrator never really understands it either. He’s telling you what he remembers, which is less than I'd expected.

The revenge takes centuries and comes to nothing much. He lives long enough that the vengeance accounting stops making sense. There’s just nobody left it all means anything to.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. It’s more literary than genre in its aspirations.