Martin Sz

SPOILER ALERT!!! I am not a great book critic, but here it is: The sections about the cultural revolution and also most of the character development of Wang were interesting, parts of the science in the beginning were mostly presented in an interesting light (but you could feel the touch of the early 2000's where everybody was talking about nano tech, hence the aliens are pretty afraid of it. The use case of the nano tech then to demonstrate the reader that the aliens were afraid for a good reason, is very unrealistic imho, even if we assume super super super advanced nano materials of the future, which were obviously not available at any time in the recent past. Also the way some scenarios turned into mere James Bond or action movie gatherings, with ad hoc tactical meetings, where incredible solutions such as this one with the nano strings were pulled out of their **** in a minute and then applied in 'Oceans Eleven' style, were very very unsatisfying for me...(More of this was the james bond villain alike meeting with the FTO members ) I have some knowledge about physics (but not professional level) and the quantum entangled protons would have been cool because of the folding in higher dimensions, but not for faster than light insta-control. I liked the in-game sequences, as it seems to be a interesting resolution (and actually a game I would probably try to play myself) for the discovery of the problem. Another aspect which bugged me progressively was that the character development outside of Ye and Wang were getting shallower and shallower und more and more incredible (such as the story of that math prodigy who went to the mountains...). All in all, the book had some good sides and also at least some cool ideas, but I was really disappointed by the mentioned negative sides so that it was not possible to ignore them...