The Quantum Dawn by Derek Künsken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One caveat before I give a full review. I thought the opening, or perhaps even the first sixth of the novel was kinda rough. No great hooks and the only eye-catching things was the SF aspects and not the characters. And this is even after a much-appreciated recap of the first three books.

But after? Once it really gets going?

It just doesn't stop. It gets crazy good on the adventure side, trouncing even some of the best big-scope hard-SF out there. Reynolds and Brin on this level. And in some ways, when we get right into the really great imaginative stuff, it's pretty mind blowing. And that's AFTER we've got quantum analyses on the fly, religious AIs, water dog space pilots, quantum tunneling flora, and a huge ass chase through time that doesn't always follow (or even usually follow) causal patterns.

Indeed, this stuff goes non-linear early on, proving that things HAD to go a certain way because they were puzzling over the EFFECTS already accomplished and had to catch up to events after decoding it through racial alien DNA messages sent backward in time to warn of several future catastrophes that had to happen to force the correct effect. And if that isn't confusing enough, I spotted several MORE instances where this had to happen minus the alien DNA and all of a sudden the whole book sounds more like a sly refutation of religious determinism by positing the infallibility of the determinism in this cosmos.

And all the while, we STILL have to treat it like the mystery it so obviously is. And it's still crazy because we're STILL unable to see the whole picture. Right, Tesseract? Muahahahahahaha.

Did I mention this is a wonderfully nerdy book? So, yeah, forgive the front of it. You'll be in for one hell of a ride by the end. Even if there is no Bel. And even if the whole novel is fraught and tense.

It's still much more exciting than it has any right to be.

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