Lucas

Really enjoyed the book but holy shit this guys internal monologue is pretty insufferable. I feel like its supposed to be written in a witty way but it just comes off kinda cringe and annoying

An incredibly vivid book, it felt like i could picture every scene not just in visual detail but emotional. I did think the first half of the book dragged on a bit, feeling like the same shenanigans repeated over and over. definitely very thankful for all the footnotes in the copy i was reading as a lot of the references wouldve gone over my head otherwise

I think I just really like books about a bunch of people making a lil society and how they survive together. So much so that I kinda wished that this book was longer, that it'd give more details about the world they created. But I guess that's kinda the point of the book - that over a timescale of 700 billion years, nothing is interesting or relevant or special

Ok 2.5 was probably a bit harsh. I was just pissed at the writing style. The first half of the book leans heavily on magical realism, but the time-jumping narrative makes it incredibly hard to follow what's actually happening, which I found very frustrating.

But the second half of the book is really interesting, and surprisingly relevant to modern times for a book written in 1940. The eponymous invention is a machine that projects "images" of humans which are life-like to every sense, which raised some interesting "Turing test" questions about consciousness.

I especially liked the line, when referring to the machine, "It will know only what it has already thought or felt, or the possible transpositions of those thoughts or feelings"

So cool when writing can span almost a century like that

Pretty tricky to read book, not just because of the sometimes pretty graphic descriptions, but also for the short, staccato nature of the writing. I think it did serve a purpose though - it does help put you in the mind of the main character, someone who is broken and desensitised. But this was kind of shattered towards the end of the book, because all his actions suggest someone who is changing, then the final chapter completely undoes that, making it feel entirely out of character. Like I get plot twist or whatever, but this just felt unsatisfying.

Also, I thought the set-up was a bit unrealistic - like everyone just went along with breeding humans for food? And its alluded to that the whole 'animal meat virus' thing was actually a hoax, but this seems like something that would be hard to cover up. The parallels to the real-world meat industry I also thought were a bit ham fisted, like I know the industry's not great, but its certainly not normalised to, for example, keep a cow in your house and slowly vivisect it for pieces of meat.

Still, I thought the narrative and writing were great, especially with the portrayal of the main character (until right at the end)