I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.

It doesn’t matter if you’re reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.

In the near future, thinking machines are even slightly more everywhere than they are now. Take it one step further along the road to true general AI… and suddenly you go outright Skynet on the world. Robot Apocalypse. Get it?

The true knowledge is not in the things, but in finding the connections between the things.

This … was perhaps not the best time to read this book, with the ever increasing advances in LLMs and chatbots leading to upheaval in all manner of fields of work, along with the current instability (to put it mildly) in the United States. I think I need more stability in books right now.

To survive, humans will work together. Accept each other. For a moment, we are all equal. Backs against the wall, human beings are at their finest.

That being said, it was a fascinatingly structured book. From the very first chapter, we know humanity (or what’s left of it) eventually wins the war. Each chapter, we have comments like ’this is the last record of X’ or ‘Y had a part to play yet’ And as we go, the various plots cross and come together, sketching out the end of the world and what comes after.

I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.

It’s a fascinating book and I think well worth the read… and I’m curious where exactly the sequel can possibly go next without more of the same.