I never heard of the book before, so I’m starting from a baseline of zero curiosity prior to this review. :-)
But also, I’m curious about how all the pieces fit together, and what else might be banging around in those almost 1000 pages. I’m wondering if “the signal” is a callback to the metavirus from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and to William Burroughs’s “language is a virus from outer space” (which Stephenson was undoubtedly referencing too). I don’t quite trust your grounds for dismissing various concepts mentioned as impossible, and (as you say) concepts in SF can have other kinds of value even if they are literally impossible. Finally, whatever else it is, it is clearly a work of imagination, and such works can say something about their zeitgeist, or can be weird untimely works that stand alone.
I never heard of the book before, so I’m starting from a baseline of zero curiosity prior to this review. :-)
But also, I’m curious about how all the pieces fit together, and what else might be banging around in those almost 1000 pages. I’m wondering if “the signal” is a callback to the metavirus from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and to William Burroughs’s “language is a virus from outer space” (which Stephenson was undoubtedly referencing too). I don’t quite trust your grounds for dismissing various concepts mentioned as impossible, and (as you say) concepts in SF can have other kinds of value even if they are literally impossible. Finally, whatever else it is, it is clearly a work of imagination, and such works can say something about their zeitgeist, or can be weird untimely works that stand alone.