Purgatory Mount

A retelling of Dante's Inferno. I think this book suffers most from its own grandiose ideas. Really we have two separate stories - the first part and last part of the story deal with a space expedition which visits the titular mount. The middle part of the book, which comprises the majority of the actual story deals with the ideas of personal liberty in a dystopian future America. There is little to nothing linking these two parts together which is a bit jarring and there is a massive difference in style and enjoyability of the different sections.

Lets start with the good. The central part of the novel is by far the strongest. Here we have the story of a group of friends who have stolen some technology and hidden it on their own private network, amid a backdrop of a failing American state with open insurrection and uber surveillance. The themes of personal liberty and privacy are delved into in an interesting way, through the background of interrogation and multiple different actors trying to gain control of the information being held. This is gritty and dark stuff with an impressive world building and a wonderful sense of dystopian darkness.

The technology being hidden forms the loose bridge to the remaining part of the novel. This section unfortunately gets lost in its own grandiosity. Who are these beings? Why are they doing what they are doing? It all becomes quite messy and incomprehensible and lost in its own mythologizing. There are some interesting tidbits on the meaning of humanity and personhood but the jarring sense of disconnect from everything else just made it confusing. I struggled to understand the point of this and it ended up massively detracting from the rest of the story