I can't say I don't understand why people talk about and recommend this book so much. It's got really cool concepts and is the originator of things such as Faction Paradox, type 103 TARDISes, and what I believe eventually becomes The War in Heaven. It's got weird science and body horror and a funeral for everyone's favourite astronaut, Laika. What's not to love?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Honestly, I was really looking forward to this book, especially after how bored I was reading the last one, but I found myself getting increasingly frustrated the further I went on, to the point where I just couldn't force myself to pick up this book for a week. I had to push myself to finish it at all.

It's nothing wrong with the writing, necessarily. The style is good. It's moreso the plot. The vast majority of this book is filled with people standing around in an enclosed space, talking and arguing about things that really don't matter and I just can't care about. All of that is interspersed with flashbacks, some of which don't even feature our main cast, giving tiny tidbits of information that may or may not be relevant to the story. It's atmospheric, sure, but a story can't run entirely on atmosphere.

All this isn't even mentioning that there are far too many characters. The UNISYC people didn't even need to be there, they served no purpose for the story. With so many characters and moving parts, I didn't feel like we got to know any of them, let alone knew them enough to like them or care about them. Once E-Kobalt shows up there's two or three chapters where large swaths of dialogue are extremely difficult to parse due to the way they're formatted. When I'm already so frustrated with the pace of the book and how long it spends on people talking at each other without saying much, it's extremely grating.

There were only two properly engaging parts of this book, in my opinion. The first is the prologue, with Laika's funeral, which didn't suffer from getting bogged down in the slow pace of the rest of the story, as the story hadn't properly started yet. It's a beautiful moment that gave me high hopes for the rest of the book.

The second part I liked was the scenes in the vault with Sam and Adrianne. The horror was really well described, vivid and gripping. Unfortunately, it was continuously broken up by scenes I didn't care about with a much slower pace.

For all the cool concepts introduced in this book, I didn't feel that any of them were properly utilised. Maria, the first type 103 TARDIS we see, is out of commission for most of the book so she doesn't function like a character the way she was clearly designed to. Faction Paradox is a lot cooler on paper than the superstitious cult they are here, and the excessive, egregious, incorrect, and frankly, racist use of the term "voodoo" didn't make me like them any better.

The mysteries of who the Shift and Trask work for, as well as what's in the casket, were pretty underwhelming and predictable. We never found out who Qixotl was or how he and the Doctor know each other. The mystery of Sam's inconsistent biodata is only one I just can't find it in me to care about. I didn't feel that it was really focused on the way something like that should be, and from what I know of tie-in novels I don't trust that it's a thread that will ever be picked up again. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, though.

I guess, at the end of the day, a lot of this book felt really unnecessary. The worldbuilding overtook the plot, but while it had the potential to be really cool and interesting worldbuilding, a lot of it really fell flat because of it. For large swaths of the novel I felt like I was reading a textbook interspersed with poetry. If I wanted to read that, I'd continue my reread of Celtic Mythology: Welsh and Manx.

Now it's time to start Kursaal and hope I'm one of the few who like it.