Purgatory Mount

When I read the description for this on NetGalley I thought that it would be right up my street, a return to quite hard sci-fi. Space travel, a mysterious object on a distant planet, possibly aliens. What more could I want?

We start out on a gigantic galaxy spanning ice ship and biosphere with beings (future humans?) who can alter their interactions with the passage of time. As this part expands it definitely has a great 70s feel, good hard sci-fi with a couple of shock points thrown in to twist the story.

Then suddenly we’re taken to a dystopian near future USA which is in a lot of trouble, both politically and environmentally. How messed up you ask? Succession and the U.S.S. Donald Trump come to mind.

I don’t want to give too much away for the part set in this near future dystopian version of the USA, but the reveal at the end of the section is slow and well thought out and clicks into place so well with the information that has been slowly given throughout the rest of this section.

We are then returned to the ship with the society that it has and this is put through a great upheaval which is linked into the dystopian part and explains a bit more of what happened.

Overall a great read with lots of different levels of approach, depth of thought and adventure together in the best tradition of masters like Philip K Dick makes me want to read more from Adam Roberts.