"Anything else?"
"Actually, yeah."
They waited.
"You folks ever seen a guy with a tarantula?" ( )

Very compelling page turner with a really interesting concept. I did not understand all the science jargon (bits of which I think he just invented without explaining, which fine) but the stuff I *did* understand was genuinely interesting. In a way having a lot of words I only vaguely got an impression from was good because it makes the whole thing seem as alien and out of my comprehension as it should be. ( )

A spaceship built out of an asteroid with a singularity at its heart circumnavigates the galaxy over and over, laying down a series of wormhole gates as it goes. But circumnavigating the galaxy the non-wormhole way takes a very, very, very long time. An unimaginably long time. It's been going now for over sixty million years, meaning that those on board, who spend most of the journey in suspended animation, have probably long outlived their entire species. Certainly, nothing that looks human has ever come out of the gates behind them. How long is it going to keep going? Well, that's a very good question. One that some of the crew are starting to ask. One that the ship's limited AI hasn't really provided a satisfying answer to.

It's apparently been a while since I've read this kind of big-idea, cosmic-scale, sense-of-wonder-invoking SF, and even longer since I've read one that didn't kind of ruin it by being really poorly written. But, boy, was it fun to come back to it with this one. The vast scope of it really fires up the imagination, and the very limited perspective we got on it all, leaving so many fascinating unanswered questions, only stokes the imagination even more. It's rather niftily done.

Somewhat less niftily done is the plot, involving the titular revolution against the ship's AI, which is at best very lightly sketched out. I do have to wonder if a longer version -- this one is right on the cusp between novella and novel -- might have been more fully satisfying. But then, a longer, more detailed focus on the logistics of it all might have just bogged the whole thing down and diluted the effect of the nifty stuff. As it is, the plot development did just exactly as much as it needed to for it all to work, and, you know, I will absolutely take that over some hypothetical version that goes on long enough for me to stop going "Oooooh, neat" and start getting bored.

The one thing that I do wish had been done differently involves a particular gimmick that I won't spoil, although I think becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly. It is sort of thematically appropriate, and I'm sure the author thought he was being very clever, but I just found it constantly distracting and immersion-breaking, which was a real disservice to a story that deserved better. ( )

Very good, but I still don't quite get the ending. I'm not sure what else there was other than Chimp. ( )

I quite enjoyed this one. I'm comfortable with a bit of ambiguity, or at least not understanding everything that's going on. Some people seem to have a problem with this.
( )