Three storylines run through this, alternating with no warning, a physicist in near-future London whose breakthroughs in quantum computing come paired with the fact that he’s also, unambiguously, murdering people, a washed-up starship jockey with debts and a haunted past out in the Kefahuchi Tract, and a woman who’s had most of her body replaced with machinery running errands in a corrupt tank-farm city. Harrison does not hold these threads together with a bow at the end the way I half expected, they connect in the way that matters, thematically, gesturally, rather than through a plot mechanism that explains everything.

What got singled out by more than a few reviewers I’ve seen mention this, and what genuinely got me too, is how the “singularity” tech in the space sections, K-tech, is never actually explained, humanity just found alien artifacts nobody understands the mechanism of and built an empire on top of them anyway, which is a much scarier and more honest version of a space-opera setup than the usual clean exposition dump. The Kefahuchi Tract itself, an object so strange even the aliens who’ve studied it longer than humans have given up trying to model it, works as a genuinely unsettling cosmic-horror center of gravity for the whole book without Harrison ever describing it in a way that resolves the dread.

The Kearney sections are the hardest to sit with, deliberately, his violence is neither glamorized nor fully explained and the prose keeps its distance in a way some readers find cold. I didn’t love every page of this, the pacing in the middle third sags around the tank-farm sections specifically, but the ending, where the three threads’ actual relationship finally clicks into focus without ever fully resolving into comfort, earned the confusion that came before it.