the narrative personas fit an audio book format so well - it’s just plain fun and more than that too - you’ve got the brain in a vat premise squared (and then some), you’ve got the von Neumann probe as the defacto way to go “Where no man has gone before” because - duh - and best yet, dialogue like this: “Remember the Prime Directive.”

“Right. When people show up in a hundred years, and we have to explain to them that they missed meeting the only other sentient race we’ve ever found by less than a century, I’m sure they’ll be mollified by the knowledge that we didn’t break a fictional law from a TV show.”

and it just keeps coming at you like that ! what a fun book !