Ra

Another amazing addition to qntm's vast bibliography of truly amazingly written sci-fi thrillers.This book combats the concept of quantum thaumics, the matrix, interstellar wars against vast artificial intelligence.There have been many days where I've read through a hundred pages, and 'woke up' per se not quite knowing where I was in reality.This. Was. Amazing.

Really good, great writing style. A tad hard to follow at times.

This book wraps several different six fi genres into its dense web of plot. It clips along at a pace and the ending isn’t entirely expected and maybe a little unsatisfyingly vague. The motivations and expositions are left a bit sketchy. But it’s an incredibly accomplished book and a very very good read.

Found this book on social media pretty much at random, was intrigued and took a chance on it, and it's one of the best sci-fi novels I've ever read. Similar to The Three Body Problem, it is a tight and well-written book set in an insanely inventive universe and I was genuinely sad when I finished it. Recommended.

Such a cool take on the Sci-Fantasy subgenre, with magic being an advanced field of engineering that requires many years of training to even cast the most basic of spells

I had high hopes of this book as the sample I had was interesting. However, I soon found myself losing touch with the book and the story it was telling and just couldn't find the will to read on. The writing is good, plotting also I guess but Ra and I did not get on and I deleted it.

Loved antimemetics and saw comments saying this was similar. It is not. It's way too long, complicated (in the wrong way) and boring.

I found this hard to follow and unengaging, I gave up about a quarter of the way through.

The initial premise is so great! A scientific magic. As the book continues, the plot becomes factually complex and mindbending. Some gruesome body horror, a very visual book

Für mich eine perfekte Mischung aus Fantasy und Scifi und dabei an wenig Stereotype der beiden genres gebunden.

This book is terrific. Buy it if you like hard SF.I would say buy it if you like rational fiction, but if you're familiar with that genre, you've probably already read it. Personally, I've already read it multiple times--both the original ending and the rewritten one that I'm guessing appears here--and I'm still buying it because it's just that darn good.RA is hard to describe, though. It's a lot like one of those forced perspective gifs, where there is a huge paradigm shift and suddenly you realize the scene you thought you were seeing is actually something totally different. Except it's the basic nature of all of reality that shifts instead of a guy apparently getting into a new Lamborghini that turns out to be a matchbox car. I can't really say too much without risking ruining it. I love books with that kind of wild perspective shift, though, and this is one of the best I've read.It's not a perfect novel, but the ideas packed in are just so huge and so well used that it's hard to stop thinking about. It deserves its own fanfiction. It's one of those books that you finish a little angry because it's so damn brilliant you're kind of mad that it wasn't you that wrote it. Top notch worldbuilding.Frankly, I wish Sam would give up programming and write full-time.

Brilliant, on par with Iain M Banks

I picked this up after "There is No Antimemetics Division" and I rudely thought "Oh, I can see how this is a similar kind of story" but it contains several events which are not just twists but really shifts in the perspective of the whole story. I really can't think of anything I didn't like about it. It's emphatically not just the "what if magic were real and it was as boring as engineering" trope.