This felt like the kind of book that won’t age well, full of references to contemporary politics in a way that was a bit too obvious. But you wouldn’t have got that from the book jacket. There are books that can incorporate that into the story well, but this just felt so jarring and repetitive that after awhile, it interrupts you out of the narrative out of sheer annoyance.

I found this in a bookshop and it sounded really interesting. It’s a post-capitalist future where corporate enclaves, remnants of nation states and ‘watersheds’ exist. The watersheds are collectives where people work alongside each other and try and repair damage done to the ecosystem. But in the middle of one, alien first contact is made, but the aliens want to rescue humanity from earth and their polluted planet.

The problem was that there was so much random stuff from deep discussions of gender, to so many references to breastfeeding (omg) and just SO MUCH TALKING, that all of that gets lost. There are just so many characters, who don’t have enough space to be anything other than confusing at times. Who is this again? What do they do? It was essentially a very dull read, with not a lot going on and some of it begging incredulity. I just couldn’t vibe with it, is what I’m saying. Also, it felt a bit de-growth environmentalism which always seems a bit sad to me.

There were lots of nuggets of interesting things, like the protocols set up to have independent networks and weighted decision making to take the environment into consideration. And while this all made up the world building, it felt like it never really lead to anything. One of the big conflicts just seemed so contrived – just to get a couple characters to do something in the final act – which felt like it could have been much better handled. Entire tangents spun off to have such minor import in the final act. It just feels like some of the world building could have been more central to the plot and ultimate resolution. Instead, a lot of it was just words and techno-babble.

Anyway, not for me, as you could have guessed.