review:
The best way I can describe this book is as if Jules Verne and Stephen Baxter had an adventure story written for Star Trek. Its simultaneously hard science fiction, as hard as it can get, with just a fantastically new and alien perspective on life and intelligence, and also a commentary of society and a truly grim outlook on the corporate capitalist nature of economy. The book itself is about aliens that evolved to treat the EM spectrum as communications medium without any sunlight, meaning only things that interact specifically with the EM bands are relevant. Human meatbags are not. Human made vehicles are. An adventure across the planet ensues. Brilliant, and extremely rewarding. I also somehow read this (hopefully) as a link to the next book in the Children of Time series. I'm going to be hunting for Tchaikovsky's books - the man has a talen for rapidly producing intelligent situations and writing multiple books in a year.,