illegible_scribble
6/23/2019
The first novel in this series really flew under my radar (and obviously that of a lot of other WWEnders) when it came out, despite being from Gollancz, and despite it being a really good book. However, I caught wind of this sequel, and ended up tearing through both of them in two subsequent evenings.
The worldbuilding here is amazing. The story takes place 150 years after the disappearance of The Masters, a superior alien race which showed up, terraformed large portions of the Earth for some mysterious purpose, and redistributed millions of humans to 37 other colony planets in the galaxy.
Set on one of those colony planets, the book features an intelligence agent whose wife died under mysterious circumstances more than 5 years before. He scavenged every scrap of video, text, and other transcripts of his wife into an AI simulacrum of her personality, with the intent of finding out what really happened. But now that AI has mysteriously disappeared, and mysteries he thought he'd solved are just starting to deepen.
I found these novels so interesting and excellent that I was really surprised at the lack of buzz about them. I highly recommend both books for fans of science-fictional mystery and adventure.