I can put something together. Come with me and give me your opinion. You look great, and anybody who can wear pink clothes with orange hair is clearly worth taking fashion advice from.

A book about the theory of the primacy of the observer: "the seemingly absurd idea that the universe springs from life, not the other way around."

In sci-fi, I expect new/non-existent technology, and I hope to be shown uses of that tech that I hadn't imagined. This book leans mostly on its theory, with some tech built to take advantage of it. However, it doesn't show off many new sights. Instead of exploring the implications of the theory, large portions of the book are spent trying to convince you, the reader, of this theory.

It turns out that Robert Lanza has published before about his theory of biocentrism, which seems very similar to the in-novel theory of the primacy of the observer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lanza#Biocentrism

As another philosopher says of Lanza's theory: "It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn't explain how [consciousness] happens at all. He's stopping where the fun begins."

I feel the same about this book: it stops where all the fun begins. It doesn't dive into the possibilities of what living in a consensually created world looks like, it has vague and sometimes contradictory descriptions of how a multiverse would work, and the moments when characters *create new parallel universes out of their own minds* are all somehow mundane and lacking in wonder (well, maybe except for the very last time).

Also, at least in my ARC copy, the book was so full of typos and sentence fragments that I kept getting distracted from the story. That drops it down a full star as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully those can get cleaned up before the official release.

I liked the plot and characters decently enough.

Thanks to the authors for providing me with an ARC as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

And my notes from the read-through...

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Pg. 7: The techs didn't answer, but their glances at each other spoke terabytes [...]

Spoke terabytes? Who is this book trying to impress?

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Pg 8: Samuel Louis Watkins, genius Nobel laureate, switched on the bedside lamp and heaved himself upright in bed. Cheekbones sharp as chisels, bald head shining in the lamplight.

What's with the odd sentence fragment?

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Pg 23: All her hopes and dreams, all the years of grueling work, all the loans she'd taken out after her mother disinherited both her and Ellen... Without a good hospital appointment, how would she be able to repay her loans?

I think the author really wants to hint and give us information, but doesn't want to info-dump and is trying to show-not-tell. It comes across like a Facebook post fishing for attention.

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Pg 33: "I know *your* condition," Luskin said, a pre-emptory thunderbolt in his own voice.

"Peremptory" or "pre-emptive" both sort of work, but "pre-emptory" isn't a proper word. Pretty sure the author meant "peremptory." Easy mistake, though.

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Pg 41: Someone named Ben Clarby was supposed to meet her at the airport. Google had offered her three dozen Ben Carbys, and she'd no idea which this one was, or what connection he had to her great-uncle. Or very much about Samuel Lewis Watkins, except for what was public knowledge.

What's that last sentence doing?

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Pg 71: She could smell the ocean but neither see nor hear it.

Pg 71: *Too many flowers, sickening sweet.*

There are lots of little editing issues with this book. Will they be able to fix them for the January publication? I'm not writing all of them here, but I noticed two on one page and wanted to point it out. I'm having a hard time ignoring the book and focusing on the story.

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Pg 95: She and Ellen as children in the elaborate playroom their mother had filled with toys instead of her maternal presence. Caro and Ellen had never played with most of the toys.

Am I just too sensitive to sentence fragments? They bug me.

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Pg 74: So, according to Weigert and Julian, did alternate branches of the universe, as "created" by computer chip and human decision.

I had to read this several times before I finally realized it's a sentence fragment. It doesn't make much sense without the previous sentence (not included here because I don't want to type it out).

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Pg 84: "I'm a doctor, Julian. I save lives, not experiment on them."

There might be a fun story here, but I'm having a hard time enjoying it with these awkward sentences.

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Pg 98: "Caro, feel free to bark all the orders you want [...]" Caro laughed. It hurt her face. "I'll bark softly and carry a big bone saw."

This gave me a chuckle. :)

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Pg 107

I enjoy sci-fi with weird new science (like Isaac Asimov's psychohistory), but the way this book presents its new science thing makes me feel like it's trying to convince me. It doesn't help that the sci-fi weirdness is based on Lanza's published theories. Is this book his way of evangelizing his not-quite-new-age theory? It's annoying me.

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Pg 114: She paid particular attention to entanglement, that phenomenon in which measuring ("making an observation") about one particle instantly changed a different particle with which it had been entangled---even when they were widely separated. [...] Everything the brain did was only a possibility until it actually did it, and the possibilities were unlimited, although some were much more probable than others.

Ugh. This almost-science bugs me.

With entanglement, measuring one particle doesn't change its entangled partner. As wikipedia puts it, "entanglement produces correlation between the measurements."

The second sentence bugs me because it applies to everything. It sounds like it's saying something special, but it's not.

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I've been mostly enjoying the story. I still don't like the physics explanations, though.

Pg 289: *What would happen if we could change the algorithms that collapsed the quantum waves in the brain?*

As far as I understand it, you can't control the result of collapsing a "quantum wave." You can decide what property (or properties) to measure, but you can't decide what values those properties will take.

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. But the science stuff here falls in an uncomfortable realm that is beyond blatant sci-fi silliness like "reverse the polarity,"but falls short of seeming real. I wish there was less explanation & arguing of how it's supposed to work.

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Pg 309: There was no way to be sure of course, since there was no way to have communication between branches [of the multiverse].

Inconsistencies bug me.

These are the physicist's words, saying you can't communicate with other branches of the multiverse. But he has visited the same alternate branch at least three times now to see his dead wife.

The rules of multiverse stuff in this book are both too spelled out and not clear enough.

Another thing: death isn't the end, according to the story, but so far they haven't touched on what might precede life. They say consciousness has no end, so what about beginnings?

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Pg 347: "I need to know long you're staying with the project."

Yes, there are still odd editing mistakes even this far in.

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I feel like this book doesn't explore the implications of its own sci-fi tech enough. Instead it focuses on trying to convince the reader.

Pg 379: Then Kayla was the gull; the gull was she; both were the starfish squirming in Kayla's beak, and the warm ocean air rushing under the beat of her wings.

Kayla uses new tech while sitting out in a normal chair to become a passing seagull. She becomes a body snatcher. What's to stop her from using the same tech to possess the people around her?

Also, more fundamentally to the story, how does a consensually created world work? If I write a secret word on a blackboard, and two people go in the room separately to see it, how does this theory explain all of us experiencing the same word on the chalkboard?

I enjoy many Nancy Kress books, but this wan't one of her best. Interesting concept, well executed, but the science basis was heavy and intrusive, unlike the usual light-but-thorough Kress science touch. Predictable and rather over the top romantic angles, and the ending felt rushed and unsatisfying

This book started out as four stars for me - a nice speculative tech thriller, and an easy, fast read. Not stunning enough to merit five stars, but definitely enjoyable and worth recommending to people who generally like this sort of thing. At the same time, though, there were a few things that bugged me, most of which point to poor editing.

For example, there were several rather extensive descriptive passages that were repeated two or three times in the first half of the book, which felt as if the author(s) had moved the passages around a few times in different drafts, but never got around to deleting or rewriting the other instances. Sloppy.

And then there was the repeated use of the term "jailbreak marriage," mentioned way more times than necessary and used as if it's as common as something like "shotgun marriage." Although I could figure out from the context what it meant, I'd never heard the term before, so I Googled it, and found only two real references - one citing its use in Gail Sheehy's "Passages," and another referring to Mormon culture. So definitely not as common as the author seems to indicate with its casual and frequent use here.

Finally in this category - MINOR SPOILER HERE - there's a character that disappears in the early part of the book, with no further information about what happened to them. On page 195, however, there's a very casual mention in the narration that another character has been "so thrown by X's death," as if everyone knows the missing person is dead, though there have been absolutely no previous hints to the reader that this is true. I wondered if I'd missed something, but going back over the previous pages didn't reveal anything. Then, however, 55 pages later, on page 250, there's a huge dramatic moment when the FBI shows up to announce to everyone in the story that X has been found dead. That's definitely poor editing.

What finally moved this book down from four to three stars for me, though, was the last 16 pages. I won't include any real spoilers here, but while some storylines seemed to be appropriately winding down at this point, I was starting to wonder how they could wrap it all up in the very few remaining pages. And then - quite literally from out of the sky - a Very Big Thing happens, everything spins out of control, several More Big Things happen...and the book ends, leaving me wondering what I had just read and what happened to the much more thoughtful story I'd been reading for almost 400 pages. Bleh.

But I do see a lot of five-star reviews here, so some people must have really liked it.