Short Review
TLDR version
Great book. Requires a little grind while getting through. Contains romance, mystery, and aliens.
Overall Rating
Reading Effort/Difficulty
Warnings
Might require a bit of patience to get through the parts that describe the ocean in details, those seem a little out of place sometimes. And some parts just feel like literature review of fictional research work.
Themes
Personal identity
What makes us human, or what makes you “You”? Is it our memories? Our experiences? If an exact copy of you is made, with all the memories, will that new person be “You” or a different individual? Will that copy be a “human”?
Contact with an alien civilisation
How will we understand an alien being that is different than the living things we have come across? How will we contact something that is indifferent to us?
Unfathomable frontiers of the universe
How will we react when we find something quite different to our understanding of the universe? Do we try to understand it, steer clear, or just destroy it? And how unprepared we are to explore the universe.