Permafrost

I am a big fan of Mr Reynolds, House of Suns will forever be a book I look back fondly at. Sadly Permafrost was the exact opposite of that experience.

Gives tantalizing glimpses of an interesting future, but there's very little meat to it. I liked the new view on what time may be and how it would adjust to changes, but at the end of the day this was very standard exploration of time travel + paradoxes with a stereotypical “closed loop” ending where the entire journey was invalidated in the last few pages. It was well executed and clearly the intention all along (and not an “oh crap, I can't figure out how to end this”) copout - but I found it extremely unfulfilling.

Characters are cardboard cutouts and undergo precisely 0 character development from start to finish. This is always a risk in hard sci-fi, but usually the “big idea” pay-off makes up for it, which this book cannot claim.

As an additional note, while I do not rate books on length or cost, but rather quality of execution and how long the ideas stay with me, potential buyers should be aware this is extremely short - novella length at best. Looking at my emails from Amazon/Goodreads I can derive that finished it in about 81 minutes, and this is one of the few times in my life I look back on the time I spent reading a book and wish I had that time back - which, if you think about how little time that actually represents is very telling.