Very effectively did exactly what it set out to. Now I admit the jumping around in the beginning confused me, but as I knew it's short, I persisted. And I'm glad that I did. Turns out that TT is only half the thematic intent, and Tatiana's storyis most of the rest. Hubris is the resonant bass.

The reading experience reminded very much of [b:This is How You Lose the Time War|43352954|This is How You Lose the Time War|Amal El-Mohtar|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1653185078l/43352954._SX50_.jpg|58237743]. Again, the chaos through time, the omission of everything not critical to the themes, the brevity, and the exploration of what it means to be intimate with another souled life.

Yes I do recommend it if you like TT, hard SF, and can handle not getting all the details of plot development and world-building that the author didn't spell out to us. ( )

Time travel stories are difficult to write well. This one qualifies. However, it also feels short and a bit rushed in places. It would have benefitted from a bit of expansion. ( )

2.5 I guess? Time travel plots are very, very hard to do well I think - they're inherently an unpleasant blend of too complex and mostly arbitrary. The length of this one also works against it, giving the multiple storylines no time to breathe. The explanation of the peril to the mission (which in itself gets barely any time) is just tossed off at the end and feels like a damp squib. Theoretically this is competent but it just feels unsatisfying. ( )

A super good time travel novel without all the annoying paradoxes within which some writers seem to get themselves messily tie up in knots.

I can't really say much more without ruining the story.   So i'll just say, even if you don't usually enjoy the temporal sci-fi stuff, read this, it's good.

Next up in Alastair's literary journey is Polished Performance.

Bye for now. ( )

"There’s a final generation now, after World Health brought in the forced sterilisation programs. It was a kindness, not to bring more children into the world. I teach them, those last children. But they won’t have anything to grow into."

Sound like 2020?
~2082. Scientists mucking around with bioweaponry have released a nightmare that will mean the end of human life. It starts with the animalitos who live in the soil, and keep it fertile and are the means of decomposition. Dying, soil can no longer produce crops. Then, insects above ground die, so now the birds have no food. Who eats the birds? Moving up the food chain, all flora and fauna of the planet are meeting their death, and humans are no exception. A radical experiment, aided by the "Brothers, four AI machines named for the Karamazovs, and using second-hand MRIs scrounged from hospitals, will attempt a form of time travel to bring some genetically-modified seeds that will grow in sterile soil, to the future.

“Paradox,” Margaret said. “Black and white. Either present or absent. If you don’t observe, paradox hides its claws. If you attempt to observe, it kills you—metaphorically, mostly.”

A creative treatment for a time travel book to say the least, I enjoyed reading this novella.
( )

It’s the year 2080 and life on earth is all but gone, the soils sterile, the oceans empty. First to go were the insects, then green plants, marine life, all life; only a final dwindling generation of humans are left, half-starved and living on the last of the stored foods. So a project has taken shape, a single desperate attempt to save the day: the idea of Permafrost is to reach back through time more than half a century and retrieve the contents of one of the many seed-banks which still existed back in the 2020s, underground vaults dotted around the globe where the planet’s plant life, in effect, was being preserved. Something else that no longer exists by 2080 is countries (ahhh, if only… Much as I’d love a real-life time machine, “no countries” might actually do us a lot more good) and the only large-scale organisation left is World Health. They it is who are running the time-project from a base on the frozen rim of the Arctic Ocean where the great Siberian river Yenisei runs out into the sea.
   Permafrost is tricky to follow early on; there are scenes involving the same characters and locations, but in different decades, before it’s really clear where (or when) any of them belong, and I read the thing through twice over. Also, the kind of time travel involved is unusual—no simple Time Machines or Time Tunnels here, but (full marks to the author) something more ingenious and less direct. It’s well worth the effort though as this is a very good read, particularly if, like me, you have a soft spot for time-travel stories anyway.
   Admittedly there are (or may be…perhaps) a couple of inconsistencies in the structure: that fly for instance, for anyone who’s read it already, and those crows. Like many time-travel novels though, this one involves circles in time with events looping back around to alter themselves, and here time almost seems to have a mind of its own, gently shifting and settling to its simplest possible state to smooth away such paradoxes—even your memory of them. Which left me sitting here after my reread wondering if it had been exactly the same book second time around, or had altered in the meantime. I’ll never know. ( )

Permafrost was my first Alastair's book and definitely not the last. When you mix time-travelling with environmental disaster and add a pinch of artificial intelligence, you get an excellent meal.

At first I missed chapters in kindle edition, but once the story started pacing, I just whooshed through. All in all, a great read. ( )

While fairly short, this book was just amazing from the first page to the last. Wonderful and amazing, highly recommended ( )

Clever sci-fi novella with an interesting twist on time travel from a dystopian future. Very well done - great storytelling, interesting main characters. The ending however is sudden and a bit puzzling - there was definitely more story to be told and it makes you wonder why the author didn't develop the novella further into a full-fledged novel. Nevertheless, a good read that leaves you wanting to know more about the future world it describes. ( )

Reynolds, Alastair. Permafrost. Tor, 2019.
In Permafrost, Alastair Reynolds has abandoned his epic far-future space opera milieu for a tight, tense near-future time travel story. By 2080, a cascade of environmental and biological disasters have rendered the planet almost sterile. The few survivors in a Russian scientific team figure that humanity is in its last generation. But there may be hope in the past. The plan is to implant the consciousness of someone from 2080 in the brain of a person in 2030 to move a cache of hybrid seeds to a location they know will survive 50 years. Reynolds takes his quantum theory and the grandfather paradox seriously, and so his scientists routinely use grandfather as a verb—as in, you are getting a lot of paradox noise because you are grandfathering. You cannot travel into the past unless time machines exist in the past—and Reynold’s has a nice fix for this, which I won’t spoil. His time traveler and her host are well developed characters, and the action at the end will make your heart race. I would have nominated this one for a Hugo, but I guess they figured two good time travel stories in the novella category as all the market would bear. ( )

Fifty-some years in the future, a global die-off of insects has cascaded through the ranks of animals of every kind. Seeds no longer sprout in the dead soil, and the last generation of humans is growing up. Scientists undertake a trip to the past to steal seeds they believe may produce enough crop in the dead soil to allow humanity to survive. The hope is to get in, leave a cache of seeds where they can find them in the future, and get out without causing a disturbance in the timeline. It's pretty clever, although done somewhat on the fly since they're quite desperate and aren't entirely sure of all the parameters.

A short novel with no wasted words, enough science to make you wonder, and characters that seem very real. Excellent reading for coronavirus shut-ins. ( )

“‘My mother worked on quantum models for single-particle time travel. She showed how an electron -- or anything else, really, provided you could manipulate it, and measure its quantum state -- an electron could be sent back in time, looped back into the past to become a twin of itself in the future, one half of a Luba Pair. if you manipulated either element of the Luba Pair, the other one responded. You could send signals up and down time. But that was all. You couldn't send back anything much larger than an electron -- maybe an atom, a molecule, at the extreme limit, before macroscopic effects collapsed the Luba Pairing. And just as critically, you couldn't observe that time travel had happened. It was like a conjuring trick done in the dark. The moment you tried to observe a Luba Pair in their time-separated state, you got washed out by noise effect.’

‘Paradox", Margaret said. "Black and white. Either present or absent. If you don't observe, paradox hides its claws. If you attempt to observe, it kills you -- metaphorically, mostly.’

I nodded. ‘That's correct.’

‘But your mother went beyond binary paradox," Cho said. "She developed a whole class of models in which paradox is a noise effect, a parameter with grey values rather than just black and white.’

‘She spoke about it less as she got older," I replied. "They hammered her, the whole establishment. Treated her like an idiot. Why the hell should she indulge them anymore?’

‘Your mother was correct," Cho said placidly. "This we know. Paradox is inherent in any time-traveling system. But it is containable...treatable. We have learned that there are classes of paradox, layers of paradox.’

Margaret made an encouraging gesture in the direction of Director Cho. ‘Say it. You know you want to.’

Cho reached for his beer, smiling at the invitation. "Paradox itself is...not entirely paradoxical.’”

In “Permafrost” by Alastair Reynolds

Sorry, gotta go back to work now so that I can finish up reading “Permafrost” during my lunch break.
2080. A collapse of the ecosystem (which started with pollinating insects - a theme treated in a surprising number of early or late apocalyptic SF novels). Under the aegis of World Health, the last existing authority, the ultimate generation of humanity (this expression will be explained in the novel), which survives only through military rations, develops an ambitious plan: to go into the past, through a technology of time travel, search for genetically modified seeds that can change everything. The peculiarity of this technology is that one does not travel physically to the past: thanks to what one could call a “transtemporal quantum entanglement”, one can transfer the tiny self-replicating base of a medical nanotechnology, which is fixed in the brain of a subject and builds a way to divert its neurological functions, including speech, motor skills, sensory input, etc. In 2080, a "pilot" with the same kind of nanotech implant can then take control of the host's body in the past, the consciousness of which remains intact but is reduced to a role of spectator. In short, it is temporal telepresence, or piloting drone / host body through time. As is customary in this kind of temporal SF, the narration will be broken up into different intertwining threads: one takes place in the "present" (from the point of view of the protagonists), namely in 2080; another takes place in 2028, so in the "past"; but we are also entitled to scenes showing how Valentina, the "pilot" we follow, was involved in the Permafrost project.

Of course, it's déjà vu. Okay, do not expect surprises, and hijacking of tropes. But we could still have hoped for something very well done. Well not really, actually. Admittedly, the narrative lines at different times are rather well intertwined by Reynolds, certainly, the characters are OK; the rhythm, whether overall or revelation, is good, and yes, it's relatively well written and not bad to read. But in any case, you never touch the stroke of genius, the unforgettable book. We have the feeling that Reynolds makes (and especially for an author of this caliber and reputation) the union minimum, but I never found the deep admiration (or immersion) felt for a book like Mike McQuay's “Memories”.

One of the main problems of “Permafrost” is its excessive resemblance to other famous works devoted to time travel: thus, the fact that one does not travel "physically" in the past but that only the consciousness makes it, evoking the Mike McQuay's “Memories or Michel Jeury's “Le temps incertain”. The big difference being that Reynolds, in the field of Hard SF, lays an explanation much more detailed, scientific and solid than these two. Although personally, I remained a bit dubious about the exploitation of the almost classic, now quantum entanglement by a writer of the caliber of Alastair Reynolds. No doubt a Greg Egan would have laid something for us at once less stereotyped and more exotic at the same time.

Still in the chapter similarities, one will find highly suspicious convergences, in my opinion, with “Timescape” by Gregory Benford: consider that in this novel, a scientist of 1962 receives tachyonic messages from 1998, where an ecological collapse took place; as in “Permafrost”, temporal paradoxes have a major role to play in the plot, especially that of the grandfather. And then of course, we will think about the enormous mass of SF, written or cinematographic / television, where in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, someone goes back in time to correct the situation and avoid the cataclysm. What is important, however, is not so much the similarities with any particular work, but rather the strong feeling that in the hyper-repetitive theme of time travel, Reynolds brings nothing new (apart from his Hard SF explanation of the quantum and nanotechnological mechanisms involved, as well as his model of time as a crystal -which did not convince me at all). Certainly, to make something original in terms of Space Opera becomes increasingly difficult given the plethora of novels (or movies, series, etc.) that exist, but it does not prevent trying to at least introduce a small twist in the narrative. Everything is déjà-vu, the revelations or twists are predictable (except the ridiculous blow up of the dog), and the end is not surprising. In short, unless you are a complete beginner in terms of Space Opera, it’s hard to cry “genius” let alone originality by reading “Permafrost”.

In short, “Permafrost” is not a bad novel (short), it's worse than that: it is unattractive, offering nothing better and especially nothing more than mimicking a plethora of other works published before it, and in Reynolds’ bibliography, it is one of his most dispensable works.

The good thing about this novel thing about it and going off on a tangent…

First, we don't know what time "is". We give it the symbol "t", and then devise mathematical relationships which involve "t" that replicate what we observe. We measure "t" by using something else that measures a unit of "t" (consistently, we hope), but that just tells us whether the "t" which separates two observable events is twice our basic measure or three times that measure. It doesn't tell us what "t" is. And that allows us to co-ordinate "events" - to put them in order of ascending or descending order of our basic measure. The "t" as in "now" is just that event which falls between events observed in the past and events which fall in the future. It has no special place. And what is past and future is predicated by your choice of whether A causes B or B causes A. (I'm exaggerating. What occurs "here and now" is actually quite important since what doesn't occur "here and now" requires an additional inference of how distant relationships can be observed, which is really what relativity is all about. Relativity assumes that "here and now" can be observed with no adjustment.)
The trouble with entropy as an indication of the direction of time is that it only deals in probabilities, not in certitude. The direction of time is a far more complex problem.

Consider the following:

The molecules of an isolated body of a gas, in equilibrium, will most often be observed as being evenly distributed throughout the volume in which they are confined. That is maximal entropy. It's also (from statistical mechanics) the most probable distribution.

But statistical mechanics itself is based upon that assumption that the most entropic state is the most probable state, so when it comes to this conclusion that it is less revelatory than it first appears. It's logical, it's consistent, but it's not independent.

And nothing says that the gas could not now evolve into a state where all the molecules were located at one end of the volume. Which would represent a reduction of entropy. It's simply that this lower entropy configuration will be observed on fewer occasions.

In short, the entropy of such a system does not always increase with time. It oscillates, and statistical mechanics leads us to believe that it will spend more time in the higher entropic states than the lower ones.

The direction of time is really, really weird. Arguable it doesn't really matter. If time goes in the reverse direction, you just have to invent a new physics which reverses "cause" and "affect".
Is the direction really a fundamental, can it ever be "knowable"?

Or is it just choice of convention which then dictates how we write the physical laws so that they accord with our observations? Maybe that makes it better to define the arrow in terms of entanglement, of actual interaction, rather than probability of state. Seems like a time direction is necessary for knowledge to exist. But maybe there is only forward. Any pasts we could travel to, are actually in the future. All possible pasts are in the future too (including a duplicate of our past). That would mean that entropy could continue to increase and conveniently eliminate the concept of the paradox and our ability to manipulate the present by operating in the past.

Possibly, but then you are stuck.

If you define the direction of time in terms of the reduced uncertainty of how a wave function will be resolved (given that some resolutions of the function have been eliminated with the progress of time), that is a choice of convention. You are simply imposing a definition of time.

Reduced uncertainty is the direction of time. Why, fundamentally, should that be the case? That's simply the convention that we have chosen. Absent some other dramatic breakthrough, I don't believe in an "absolute" direction of time. And I don't think that it matters. Time is just an ordering of data. More than, less than, put it in order of occurrence. Now figure out some predictive rules. Take temperature. If we set absolute zero at 1,000 degrees and the melting point of water at 0 degrees, would it change a thing? It would change a few equations, but would it affect how we understood how ice forms? How does consciousness work if environmental connections consistently are severed rather than created? If time's running in the "opposite" direction, you know less as it passes. If you follow the straight relativistic block-time idea, you can run backwards or forwards equivalently as you wish, but from the inside it's the direction of increasing entropy that seems to make sense to a living consciousness that's evolved to accomplish various goals.

Cause and effect. Reverse them, reverse the direction of time, and you would perceive no difference.
The direction of time, and the categorisation of "cause and affect" are both arbitrary (so far as we know at the moment). As a result, there is no absolute direction of time, but rather a choice of how we choose to describe the world. The entropic argument (as generally presented) doesn't work. Isolated systems in equilibrium are perfectly able to be found in an entropic state less than an earlier state. Their entropic values oscillates. Do you want time to run back and forward according to each isolated system you can create? In which case, which system directs your time arrow?

Entropy isn't the answer. It is far, far more complicated. The universe according to: general relativity = continuous, quantum theory = discrete, loop theory = granular. It's easy to see where this is going: time will turn out not to be continuous but discrete. This will become the basis of the first unified theory of life, the universe and, most of all, everything. The Zen folk always go on about the importance of the present moment, and there being nothing else. Anyone who has done some meditation knows that time seems to slow down and even stand still. So consciousness emerges from granular time. There, another big one solved! ( )

Great time travel book. I liked the way it jumped back and forth in time as the story was told. Quite a conundrum. Very much the page turner! A very quick read. The cover said it all, "Fix the past, save the present, stop the future". Can it be done? ( )

An intriguing view of time travel and paradoxes.
( )

This is a relatively short novella, whose subject is time travel. Around the year 2050, the Earth suffers an extinction level event that results in a “final generation” living in the year 2080. In order to save humanity, a handful of “pilots” must travel back to the present to undertake a mission with the potential goal of altering history in such a way that extinction is averted, without major disruption.

Time travel has any number of facets that, if treated well, can lead to very challenging theory and thought provoking conundrum. As in this case, if you send people back in time to accomplish an important task, and they “change history”, they may never be born in the future in order to carry out the task.

The method of time travel crafted by the author in this case is brilliant. He walks a thin line between entertaining the reader and hopelessly confusing him with time travel paradox. Admittedly, at times he lost me.

Good, challenging science fiction, but very short and overpriced for the content. Can be read in 3-4 hours. ( )

I picked up a copy of this at the SF-Bokhandeln in Stockholm while meeting up with family over on a visit to Sweden. It’s not Reynold’s usual fare, but a near-future time travel story. The human race is pretty much over, killed off by its appalling lack of husbandry of its environment (that’s pollution, Global Warming, germ warfare, hunting to extinction, etc, etc), but a group in Russia have perfected time travel and send someone back into the past to make enough of a change to allow humanity a small chance at survival. It’s not actual physical time travel – which means it’s at least free of the risible technobollocks in Avengers: Endgame – but the consciousness of the tempunaut is sent back to occupy the mind of a person of the _target period. (A similar conceit, I believe to Michael Bishop’s No Enemy But Time.) Of course, as is ever the way, nothing goes as planned, and protagonist Valentina must race across Russia to deliver the maguffin, only to learn how the future has changed when she returns to it. I thought Permafrost pretty good, but I wasn’t entirely sure why it was set in Russia, or what the setting brought to the story, other than, well, the title. Reynolds has never had much luck with the Hugos, but given that Permafrost was published by Hugo darlings Tor.com then perhaps he stands a chance next year. ( )

Alastair Reynolds is better known for writing galaxy-spanning space operas. So what's he doing writing a time-travelling, climate-change novel? As it turns out, he's done rather well. One of Reynold's consistencies is that he makes the science in his novels believable; even when he's invented parts of it. We follow the desperate attempts of a group of scientists, engineers and physicians to send people back in time so that a disastrous future might be avoided. The technology is, of course, untested and has already claimed the mind of at least one of the travellers. While this may sound like a stock-standard scenario for a science fiction story, and it does, Reynold's skill as a storyteller elevates it from the mundane. Reynold's narrative jumps between different time periods. He makes use of this to dispense breadcrumbs of information which begin making sense the further the novel progresses. As mentioned earlier, Reynolds makes the science believable. His ideas regarding time travel and the possible outcomes are no exception. Reynolds keeps the story's pace up by telling it through the eyes of his protagonist, Valentina Lidova. As events begin changing in across time periods, Valentina begins to ask questions. My only complaint is that I wish the book had been longer but, only because I was enjoying the ride and did not want it to finish. If you're a fan of Alastair Reynolds, I'm sure you'll like this one. And if you've not read any Reynolds, Permafrost isn't a bad place to start. ( )

My thoughts:

I picked up Permafrost from the library's "new books" section, mainly because the title intrigued me. When I saw that it involved time travel, I added it to my burgeoning pile of library check-outs.

(I walk into the library, fully intending to return one book--Meredith, remember that long TBR list from Netgalley!--and walk out with twenty-three more books. Just in case all the books on Netgalley are duds. Or I get through all the NG books lightning-fast. Or a solar flare kills the internet and I must resort to reading print books. One can rationalize all manner of irrational things, especially when it involves books.)

Time travel has been on my mind in recent weeks. (Blame Avengers: Endgame and my daughter, for making me a Marvel fan against my will.) Thus Alastair Reynolds' Permafrost ended up on my reading list.

I'm glad it did.

Why did I enjoy this book?
1. Permafrost grabbed me and never let go.

The opening intrigued me.

After I shot Vikram we put our things in the car and drove to the airstrip. (1)

What? The narrator just shot someone. Why? What happened? Who is Vikram? By the end of the second page, I was hooked:

I thought of Vikram, of how he'd followed me out into the field beyond the farm, fully aware of what was coming. I'd taken the artificial larynx with me, just in case there was something he wanted to say at the end. But when I offered it to him he only shook his head, his cataract-clouded eyes seeming to look right through me, (...)

Afterward, Antti had come out with a spade. We couldn't just leave Vikram lying there in the field.

It hadn't taken long to bury him.

'One of us had to do it,' I answered now, wondering if a speck on my sleeve was blood or just dirt from the field" (2)

This grabbed my attention and my emotions. Obviously the narrator (later revealed as Valentina-in-Tatiana's body) and Antti care about Vikram enough to give him a decent burial. Why did they have to kill him? Why would he need an artificial larynx to speak? I didn't get answers until much later. When I did, it broke my heart.

2. The Valentina-Tatiana relationship is powerful.

Valentina has to gain sensorimotor dominance over the host. She doesn't expect to communicate with her, much less develop a caring relationship with this young troubled woman.

Once Valentina "drops" into Tatiana, she realizes Tatiana is frightened. Who wouldn't be? But she's torn: while she doesn't want to confuse the woman, Valentina has work to do. She's got to get those seeds and get them back to Director Cho. Complicating matters is that she knows Tatiana's future, and it's bleak.

Tatiana, for her part, has issues with Valentina's presence in her mind. (Who wouldn't?) Once she hears V's explanation, she sees clearly that it will not be like "nothing ever happened." Valentina and company don't--or refuse to--see this.

For me, the women's developing relationship is one of the major highlights of the story. Neither are standard-issue superheroes. No superpowers. No cool weapons. Tatiana's recovering from a stroke. Valentina's an 71-year-old school teacher. Yet they learn to work together to save the world. It may also save them as people, bringing healing to both wounded women.

3. The science is well-explained.

I know little about the science of time travel, though I've heard that scientists have made molecules travel through time. Here, Reynolds' use of time travel makes sense. While I had to reread a few parts to understand the not-entirely paradoxical paradoxes of his time-travelling system, he didn't make it overly complicated. It also did not bog down the story.

For die-hard SF fans, Permafrost may or may not satisfy your scientific leanings. Some reviewers on Goodreads were dissatisfied with this aspect of the book. Others commented that it was refreshing to read a "true" science fiction novel without all the "fantasy fluff."

4. The ending didn't disappoint me.

No spoilers. Let's just say that it was emotionally satisfying.

Bottom line:

This is a great novel. Even if you don't enjoy science fiction, give it a try. Hey, it's novella length, so it won't gobble up all your reading time!

( )

Short time travel novella, throwing in a few extra themes of climate change and AI takeover.

I don't normally like time travel very much, the obvious paradoxes are boring and ignoring them nonsensical. So this was a clever take: Using quantum entanglement to send back a nano-particle which could then replicate sufficiently to generate it's own particles still entangled with the future. These were generated within an MRI scanner allowing AIs to interpret the data sufficiently for a host with the same nano-neuro structure to be present in the historical thoughts. Quantum processes sometimes suffer lag, hence any paradoxical events newly happening in the past causes a little present confusion before being remembered as if they always had been. It's not hard science, but at least it came across beliveably

There was sufficient justification - the future now has suffered a massive climate catastrophe, beginning with insect die-back and leading to sterile soil and the total loss of all plant life. Remnants of humanity are only surviving due to stockpiled stores, which are now depleted and the final generation looms. The plan is for the time travelers to guide the safe harbour of some wind pollinated plant seeds to a location where they can be found in the future need.

I didn't buy all the science but Reynolds always writes interesting scenarios and imaginative plot twists, even in short novella like this he remains one of the greats of the field.

...............................
I had no recollection of ever reading this before. And was less impressed the 2nd time around. The setting is clever but the ending doesn't quite follow. ( )

This short novel/novella is hot off the press, so to speak, dripping digital ink. Reynolds is an author I have generally liked before, esp with stories done in novella length. I hadn't read him for a while so I jumped right on this new release when the story blurb caught my interest and early reviews were positive.

So ... this is a time travel story and Reynolds manages to come up with a pretty good approach, once one (one being me the reader) figures out what is going on. There's an attempt to show how this time travel idea works. It didn't help me and actually lessened my interest. The author lets the reader stagger into the story, purposefully leaving out details and tossing in stray bits for the sole purpose of keeping the reader off balance. Some people like that ... me not so much. I'm wondering who are these people and why are they killing each other and what's with the Russian twisty on things? If this technique had served a real purpose it might have been cool, but instead it just looked like the author was trying to be clever. I was less enamored then some who seem to like this a lot (and there are some who don't) but as I read I did get caught up in the story. There's a good story buried in the mud here. It just didn't come easy and maybe my expectations were a little too high. Short synopsis, in the year 2080 mankind and the world in general is on the verge of extinction. Scientists have been working for a decade to send a mind, a consciousness, back into the past with a critical mission that just might be able to save some life on earth (how much I had severe doubts because the world is a hugely connected system and fixing one important piece ignores the broken mess everywhere else.)

The shorter length means the world building is less than what I would like and character depth and differentiation was really minimal. It also means it can be read by a determined reader in one long evening without breaking a sweat. I split it over two days. I'm not sure this would have been a better story in a longer length, because the story is very slow going in the beginning and there is clearly a story arc by the end, but I was left a little unsatisfied. Still an interesting read even though I think some of the author's earlier works are a heck of a lot better. The end is sad. So this gets an OK from me. ( )