[<img[/img/book/AGreyMoonOverChina.jpg]] I’m left wanting to go walk along the beach, to reflect on humanity and life, to ruminate. This story is set in space, on other planets, in wormholes; it deals with A.I. and robots, but its not science fiction; neither is it a fantastic-voyage kind of space opera, like Star Trek or Star Wars (even though the latter did try to tackle ethical issues, at least in many of the episodes of TNG that I saw, back in the day) or many of the science fiction books I’ve read. Rather the backdrop, the setting, the science itself aren’t important except as a vehicle for a sweeping story following one man’s life and what he sees through the small window of his own perception of the worlds and people whose lives he created. He’s neither a hero nor an anti-hero, and unmistakably clear throughout the story is the lack of black-and-white absolutes, the often brutal and tragic clash of ambitions. It is, as one reviewer on the back cover puts it, “a sadly hopeful novel”, one woven through every human emotion.

Reality isn’t straightforward or a neat little package, and rarely do clever plots neatly play out and resolve themselves in actuality, so I appreciate novels like this. In terms of the writing, at the paragraph level, the style is good, although I ran into a few typos and editing errors, but nothing which detracted from the story. On a slightly larger scale, perhaps taking a step back, the plot is a little rough around the edges. Often the author will set the stage, let events unfold, and then much later on, still in the same setting, describe how a certain character is present and it turns out was present all along and is now doing something, which is odd and takes a little bit of getting used to because that character’s presence should seemingly have been mentioned before. Where this happened, I needed to go back and, in a manner of speaking, edit the memory of my imagination of the current scene, inserting the just-now mentioned character or object or fact. Revising history, at least in short-term memory. But perhaps that’s a feature of the story, given that it’s told as if a memoir by an old man, the architect of the story’s events, and as imperfect a writer as he is a human being. As we would expect.

Not bad for a book I randomly picked up in the library. I’m glad I read this, and look forward to the author’s next work.