Summer 2019 (Hugo Nomination 2019 -- Novella);

This book for me was a task in patience and juggling having so many questions about the novella that the novella never answer.

The world of the novella is a climate ravaged world which sent people deep below the surface for decades before life once again pushed upward. In an attempt to reclaim the world time-travel and rehabilitation of the past is being explored, which is where our characters come into play going back into the past to study rivers of the far back past.

I like that the beginning was interspersed with this confusion of absolutely opposite scenes we'd later to connect to being the primitive culture our characters go back to visit, which makes sense right at the middle of the book, when each finds the other. From there, the formatting falls badly off, though, because it suddenly starts giving us foreshadowing glimpses of what will happen about 25% of the story away from us, time-skipping the civilizations scenes without any warning.

While I could easily point to the fact the relationship heart was supposed to come from the relationship between Minh and Kiki, that only worked up until we were supposed to believe Kiki (who never took no for an answer even across several before, even to the point of amputating her own body to fit better into the future she so strongly wanted) wouldn't have once actually asked Mihn what was wrong across a single day and a half she'd left her mental intercom off. While they were present in the same physical spaces, too. Which just came down into it as way too convenient.

I'm still confused about what exactly our temporal business does, and what they'll do with the sorceresses/priestess they took back? What are hives, hells, plague babies, fat babies? What message exactly was supposed to be most taken out of this? ( )

Not bad, but didn't really engage me. The vignettes at the beginning of each chapter gave away most of the story, so the ending was very meh... ( )

DNF @ 12%

The idea sounds interesting, but there's just a lot of talk about the bid.
Most engaging parts were the Mesopotamian snippets.

Don't care enough to slog through to the end. ( )

A lot going on in this short book. It felt like a prologue to a longer story, and given the way it ended, I think it probably is. It took me a bit to get into it because there is so much going on here--the long-term effects of climate change resulting in different survival-based habitats, a critique on economics and banking, interactions between the generations reminiscent of today's generational clashes, lots of biopunk, and of course, time travel. Once the characters did travel back in time to early Mesopotamia and the story was a bit more compacted, I got a lot more invested. I would like to see how these characters handle their situation given that they were stranded in ancient history--although if the rules of time travel established in this world hold, I guess it's all kind of moot. I don't think it's that cut and dried, though; that would be disappointing. ( )

Definitely more of a 3.5.

The author plunges us deep in the middle of this post apocalyptic world and it took me a while to gather my bearings. And while it’ll probably take me a long while to ever get comfortable with all the scientific terminology associated with these kinds of sci-fi books, I was able to get the general idea and emotion behind it all. The dual timeline with the current and the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was a master stroke to make us feel invested in everyone’s lives, the discussion about the ethics of time travel as well as a very short term focused banking economy on the development of the world was fascinating, and the best part was the clash of cultures we could witness - not just between the timelines, but also within the present between the generation who survived the plagues and the younger ones born in the aftermath. That cliffhanger ending though equal parts wonderful and frustrating, because I can’t even guess what happens next. ( )