Lindsay's Reviews > Proof of Concept

A rare miss for the tor.com novella line.

Earth is a disaster, ravaged by over-population and climate change. Humanity lives in decaying hive arcologies amid the poisoned and dying planet. A project that promises to be the first steps towards getting the masses of humanity off-planet via FTL is started deep under the Earth in an abyssal cavity and some of mankind's best and brightest are recruited, including our view-point character, a young girl with a quantum computer embedded in her brain.

Sounds awesome, right?

Instead it's a tense and largely pointless exercise in dystopic information blackouts and oppressive population control while the real action all happens off camera. It's not even fiddling while Rome burns; the main character has no idea what's really going on and by the time the reveal happens the reader (at least this reader) just doesn't care.

Don't bother.