A perfectly lovely dark academia story, a bit obvious at points but never irritating with it. Good writing: nice and sharp and short sentence with evocative descriptions that don’t drag. I liked that Lane was deaf in an intrinsic way to her personhood but not in a way that overtly determined the plot. More MCs should be this way. Sometimes it’s nice for a character to just be Disabled the same way people just are. My main irritant is we kept being told Lane was ‘kind’ and yet she never acted in any way that particularly spoke towards this for me. I could have done with more active evidence to support this facet of her character.

I love a character driven hopeful sci-fi with a prickly female main character. Asuka feels very dear to me in all her petty jealous fears and compassionate good will to others. Also everyone stop saying it’s only women. There are trans men in the crew and several major nonbinary characters. It’s all people with the potential to give birth - something the author is very clear with.

But it felt like a massive black hole in the ethos that the Global South was so absent from the narrative - where are any African countries representatives? Why is a major character half Israeli and yet no one Muslim is mentioned let alone what that means for Palestine’s existence in this futuristic world? Why does America get a nuance that China’s portrayal lacks? It’s hard to swallow a story about humanity coming together to cooperate when there is this big gaping silence around the less privileged countries that make up our planet and whether they get to have a legacy past the earth that the wealthy ones do.

I think I did myself a favour by reading this out of order and just picking a heading that spoke to me. I agree there’s much weaker chapters that are hard to get into, but by going by vibe I mostly hit on things I was in the right mood to absorb.