Like being cut in half

Well, its pretty hard to find a place to start but I gotta say that this book is divisive in a lot of ways. Now that's a statement that doesn't really mean much so I'll expand on it. Obvious divisions in the book include the switching between stories every chapter, changing between third and first person every time, and as many have pointed out before me: the book is divided between a slow beginning and launching into action much later.

At first when I was reading the book the constant switching around and unexplained phenomena just had me confused more than anything. Communists to traders, gravity skiffs to wet tech, hackers to sailors. It was pretty much just a sea of unintelligible text that I couldn't figure out what to do with. As I read on however the settings, characters, technology, and spacial time distortion all kind of filed into place in a way that made them easy to understand; instead of having an supernatural or unearthly feel, everything just felt very familiar.

I ended up really loving the switching between near future and distant future. I don't think I'd have faired well reading just on or the other. They had the feel of a spy novel and a fantasy adventure story. If I had to read one or the other I'd probably have lost interest but when combined it allows Cosmonaut Keep have a fairly dynamic feel to it and it helped me enjoy both styles. One is as technical, witty, and the atmosphere is dramatic and tense. The other is more laid back about fantastic technology and it allows for more inspection of history over current events. The story with Gregor Cairns also had better imagery I thought and I found myself more drawn into the alien setting of the distant future than the paranoid and conspiracy heavy hacker's world. I'd think I would understand the near future earth better than the deep space story but the writing kind of defied my intuition.

In the end I feel a bit ambiguous when I try to express how I feel about the book. It was a tangled, horrid mess but I kinda think: so were the lives of almost every character main character, so it balances itself out. Jadey is an American Agent deep in commie territory with her cover blown; Matt has to flee the planet because he very quickly got into other people's data way over his head; Gregor has to sort out his romantic, professional, and family lives as the collapse into each other; and Elizabeth is flung into an inept adventure of grand scale and even grander consequence and all she can think about is her perpetually clueless crush. The only character who seems to know exactly where his towel is would be the Salasso, the stoned saur at the back of the airship. Telling a story like this in a strait forward and clear way would just be wrong.

Anyway, I guess my final review is that this book is confusing, creative, and as an end result: highly amusing. Good but not epic. At least the pot smoking dinosaurs didn't disappoint at all.