Or are they memories? Or is it some other place with a different character? Uh, it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The structure seems to bounce back and forth between something in the past and the present time. It may have worked slightly better in print for me as I found the audiobook extremely hard to follow due to both the structure of the book and the narrator. Unfortunately for me, I just…didn’t enjoy the process of reading this one. I love stories that explore these things! Also, vampires! Everything about this book is about humans and their relationship with technology and how far we could take things until we’re indistinguishable from the machines–technological enhancements, virtual everything, AI that is almost human-like and humans that are AI-like. There’s even a place called ‘heaven’ which seems to be a computer server–people can choose to leave their bodies behind and ascend, uploading their consciousness into the server. People become more and more integrated with technology, slowly losing their humanity in the process. The pictured painted here is fairly bleak. This book explores some fascinating ideas about a possible future of humanity. This is one of those books that just didn’t work for me but there are things that I can still appreciate about it. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find – but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can’t feel his own flesh. Something talks out there: but not to us. The heavens have been silent since – until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. It’s been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned.
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