One of the most amazing bits of serendipity involved watching a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odessy while I was in the middle of reading this. Battle between humanity and intelligent machines is a tale as old as the genre, but Watts definitely puts his own spin on it.

I am an unapologetic fan of Stargate in it's many incarnations, so the setting of this story imediately drew me in. A starship circling the Galaxy and adding nodes to a wormhole network superhighway. The idea that the human characters were only awakened every few thousand years created a weird mix of near future narration applied to far future scenarios.

That this is a fixup of some stand alone stories means that word for word - sentence for sentence - there's quite a lot happening. If you're reading on a black and white device, you might miss how the epilogue was inscribed into the body of the text.

I made a note with about 20% of the book left. "Who is more moral, the cold calculating machine striving for the common good or the human willing to do anything to satisfy principal?" That's an interesting question to think about even outside the context of this book as are most questions raised by Watts' writing. The answer we get in the book really just expands the scope of the question.

Highly recommended as an answer to the question, What is Science Fiction? This pushes every button I expect from the genre, often in delightfully unexpected ways.