I love Mr. Riddle's writing and his ideas but this one felt more like a draft than a finished book.
The first 1/3 was great and then it went to a downhill slog and a rushed ending. How the MC overcame the big villain corporation was the most laughable thing I have read in a long time. They walked straight in and inserted a virus via usb. yes, you read that right.
As with most modern books, this should be shorter.
Why are we spending so much time in this book not exploring the cool scifi concept but petty squabbles between petty humanoids?
I think I just do not like Mr. Tchaikovsky writing style, he is the kind of author that spreads out a 5 line dialogue over 6 or 7 pages. One line of dialogue followed by 1.5 pages of meandering and internal monologue until the second line follows and so on. At the end you do not know what the dialogue was about. That happens multiple times in the book. And then there was this infuriating scene where one of the main chars makes a discovery about the main plot and everyone around him knows about it but we, the readers, do not get to learn about it until chapters later and until then they go running around “but this important thing we learn is important and we need to tell” “but what we learnedness to get out”, “isn't it awesome what we learned, so mind boggling” and in the end it turns out to be underwhelming. It's so cheap.
Overall the concept, the world, the aliens are all great, I am just not a fan of the execution.
This is hard to rate, on the one hand the actual story, when it happened, was fantastic, on the other hand much of this book was world building which was done in a, for me, boring way. The usual stereotypical ‘ragtag group of' space pirates/smugglers/traders/scoundrels but with a heart of gold goes through boring pirates/smugglers/traders/scoundrels stuff and we learn about the world in the process. You have read that in a 100 books a 100 times before. But the world, the universe, is fantastic with a rich history and multiple alien races and it just feels real.
Looking forward to book 2