I can’t make heads or tails of this book and I’m looking for some new viewpoints. It’s fantastically confusing and opaque. Like why do all these things exist to accommodate humans when there are apparently so few of them? Who designs all the gadgets and equipment, why are there just random waystations for humans scattered about? Is this even Earth any more? The setting gives the impression of huge volume in 3 dimensions but the story implies the people have never left Earth. The only thing I can really glean is maybe this messed up, nonsensical, turbulent world is the result of some kind of runaway, self mutating technology. Honestly the book is rather bleak and hopeless, it’s a story of constant suffering, solitude, deprivation, mental illness, of playing an insignificant part surrounded by monumental forces, confusion, oppression. At one point it seems to imply that Crospinal has been moving through time as he interacts with an event that occurs in the past, maybe the world is inside of some device, an alternate dimension, or the result of some kind of spacetime experiment gone awry. Thing is, people saw it coming for a long time and built up ways to weather whatever the crisis was. For some reason I also got the impression that… there was very much some kind of self-fulfilling cycle going on and the “history” we were told might not actually be true, that the cryopods and “hybernating” humans might have a more recent origin. Where do the pods come from anyways, how did they get there? It seems as though the people that have woken up basically just do whatever they feel compelled to, and most seem completely insane and some of the chaos in the world could be intentional.
by oeCake