Alternate Realities: A Scifi Book Club discussion

It seems like it was set up to be a detective type novel where the protag goes about discovering what happened and it does that, but not very effectively. In most stories, there are false leads and twists, but in this story the detecting is very linear. She is never off the trail and everything becomes a hint to what actually happened.

I'm not sure I agree with you. As a disclaimer, I should say that I never see the end coming, but even so, I think there was at least one major false lead. It was something Wahram thought after the incident on Jupiter. He wonders what Swan would think if she knew he was behind the incident on Mercury. But he wasn't behind the incident, right? I read the whole book expecting Wahram to be one of the people who set the qubes off on their task to bring people back to earth or whatever. AND THEN IT TURNS OUT HE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. And, the whole qube thing wasn't about bringing people back to earth, it had something to do with a sun shield on Venus. What the f? I am still not sure if I missed a major plot point, or what.

Also, I thought the plot was sufficiently complicated without plot twists. Why, for example, is there one movement to reanimate earth and another to build (or not build? I can't remember) a sunshield on Venus? I get that this is how things happen in the real world, but in a book I expect the background politics to be related.

by the way, at some point I had convinced myself that Wahram was a qube, or that they were all qubes but had developed such human-like thinking that they weren't aware they were qubes.

so you see, if you were in my mind, there were plot twists aplenty.

I must be trusting; I never suspected Wahram at all. It does sound a bit more interesting from your point of view.

Because Swan was so impulsive and had a qube installed in her head, I always considered her an unreliable narrator and kept second-guessing everything she thought. Maybe I should be more trusting :)

My suspicions of Wahram faded pretty quickly – probably around their journey in the tunnels of Mercury.

I've found all the side-stories to be way too tangential to be particularly interesting. The main plot is excellent, but the rest is there just to justify Swan's undue position as a protagonist.