Interesting reading about a North Koean stand in when there is so much saber rattling happening in the real world. look forward to seeing which threads from the comics make their way onto the upcoming TV show. From the bit we saw on IMAX, it doesn't overlap much with this storyline.

This echoes some of Egan's earlier short stories, what with the transfer of memories. However, it's set in the very near future and engages with quite a few current issues. The legal status of

Spoiler

the protagonist

is in the same sort of limbo that autonomous cars and drones are right now. That both of those technologies are accepted in the background of the story seem to imply that "side loads" will also be accepted at some point in the future as well. The monetary cost of this sort of immortality also touches on current issues of income disparity.

The core meaty bits of the story are loss and identity, with a side dish of Hollywood inside baseball. Because it's Egan, it's wrapped up in some engineering level hard-sf, but the result is a story with so much heart that I'm comfortable recommending to any reader with even the vaguest interest in science fiction.

Solid finish.