Echopraxia

I loved Blindsight so much I think of it as a top 3 scifi favorite ever for me and even wrote the author to say how much I loved it (he answered, is a great guy and with a great sense of humor, so military I am surprised he is not one of us, the military). I compared it in its review somewhat to Reynolds, but said Watts was better by being focused.
Well, in this one he goes full Reynolds,meaning a lot of extremely imaginative hard sf background, carried forward by a creaking, overburdened narrative chassis. It starts great and then just stalls for half the book. When it picks up again, I was already bored and not invested in the story any more.
So. Probably a 5/5 for hard scifi fans, and for engineers. More of a 3/5 for those looking for a more intense and mission-focused story, like myself.
PS. It is not Blindsight 2. It happens in parallel. Good to know, because to many that came as a disappointing surprise.