Lucas

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

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