This is now my absolute favourite book he’s written. It’s very dense and abstract, and it took me a lot longer to finish it that I needed to due to how much I needed to be paying attention to it. But it absolutely nails the themes, the characterizations. It’s got some of the best prose—truly next level, compared to the previous books. Which is not to say they lacked, just that that is how good this is.

It’s also biopunk right off the bat. With these humans who are engineered and wildly different in ways I’ve never before seen in fiction. An actual moss person/identity. Another who is like a codification of data. Theres a mission to stop the corporation taking place chronologically before Borne, through multiple time streams. Which you will know because some passages have version ID numbers attached. They scale or up or down.

Then sometimes it goes into the perspectives of the other ecological beings and horrors they’ve faced. Some of which (whom?) are the personification of nature itself: it’s unknowability and adaptability dwarfing the protagonists and the company itself.

It’s just really, really good. It’s not an “easy” novel and to be honest, I’ll probably need to read it one more time just to understand the actual plot because it’s so abstracted I am certain I did not pay enough attention to the first third of it or so for me to grasp some of the things that were call backs to what happens later. Because it’s a timey whimey loop!

This will either really excite you or make you dip out probably after part 1. Luckily it’s a small book with not that many pages and you’ll find out if you’re into it fairly quickly; so there’s that. But yeah. As I said: I love it. Evocative, thematic with the rest of his work, and the absolute pinnacle of it so far, imo.