by M. John Harrison

I had to push to get through this, mostly because the present-day story felt mean to me without purpose. It opened up towards the end, as I was hoping it would, and maybe it will continue to open up as I sit with it, but I don't think it will ever morph into a favorite.

It touched a bunch of themes I was hoping it would: making decisions through randomness (dice rolls) and how that might match with quantum theory; a multi-threaded narrative that weaves together.

I did think about Delaney - his books can feature a pretty rough world too - but there's always the joy in imagination there that I didn't necessarily feel with this. It is undeniably imaginative - and there's a way the dense but spare tech description gets at some of the fun I see in Delaney. I guess part of it is I feel like I get to know Delaney a bit reading his books, where with this one Harrison is pretty opaque to me.

It might be kind of a tightrope thing that didn't quite land for me. I can see how the coldness opening up at the end could have a bigger effect - like going through a tunnel to reach a big open space. The coldness of the main present-day character reminded me of like a J.G. Ballard character - but even those have usually been more interesting to me - maybe it was meant as a commentary on those types of characters...

I pushed through because of all the nice blurbs - like China Mievelle and Ian Banks. A lot of the reviews seem to focus on how it's more 'literary' than a lot of sci-fi. I thought it was well-written but it didn't get me to me on a sentence level in the way that 'literary' stuff I like usually does.