A paper-thin, pointless, boring plot, an oddly religion and sin-obsessed story, boring characters, stilted unnatural dialogue, internal inconsistencies...this book is a litany of failures.

Also I don;t think the author knows how military ranks work ( )

Written as a confessional tale of a man guilty of a horrible crime whose nature is not disclosed or even apparent until near the end. Humanity has spread across the stars thanks to instantaneous transmission of information, but not matter, by Ansible. At some point in the past a massive war against some completely unknown and powerful enemy was fought, and so military officers are trained on Earth and then copies of them are transmitted to distant bases. Success in a posting means that someone's skills might be valuable enough for them to be copied elsewhere, probably a more desirable location, and certainly insuring better things for the next copy. Or maybe there was no war and its just a way to convince people to copy themselves to horrible locations they wouldn't otherwise go to in order to provide labor and genetic diversity for marginal colonies.

In any case Ronaldo Aldo starts off as a naive and moderately qualified pilot and junior officer sent to a forward base/backwater colony/dumping ground for military misfits, where his diligent efforts to do a proper job rather than fit in to the nihilistic culture of the base earn him nothing but enmity from the officers and enlisted, and from most of the colonists and the religious leaders on the planet the base orbits. All of which leads to his own breakdown and eventual unforgivable crime.

Joe McDermott tries to explore what extreme isolation, knowing there is another "you" living a presumably better life, and that your society disposed of you and neglected you because it could, not because it needed to, will do to a person and to a group. He does a moderately good job of telling the story, but not an especially engaging one. I read the novel over the course of several weeks of lunch-hours but was never especially engaged and finished it out of habit as much as anything. The 70s movie Dark Star does nihilist-exiles in space better, and The Sparrow does crime/confessor/religion in space better. ( )

This book was great! Really well written sci fi about the loneliness of space, and it makes you think about cloning and all the problems that can arise from that. If you like well written, fast paced stories, you'll love this book.

I received this from Tor for an honest review ( )