Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I, like many others, picked up a copy of this book based on the recommendation of Hugh Howey, the author of the Wool saga. As a side note, the Wool series is the tightest, freshest entry into the science fiction genre in many years. I sincerely believe we will look back and discuss the impact of Wool like the impact of Dune. So, when an author of this stature recommends a book to me, I am willing to give it a shot. I feel like Mr. Mather is trying to be a jack of all trades, and in the process has spread his narrative rather thin. The premise of Atopia is that around 2050-2075 or so, the population of earth is 10 billion, and multiple wars for resources have devastated the planet, and wealthy groups of private citizens have built floating enclaves in the middle of the ocean. As another reviewer pointed out, it's a bit like Bioshock. Within a few chapters, the author has started spinning his elaborate story of distributed consciousness and "metaverses" created by nanobots inside of people which allow them to somehow make use of the concept of neuroplasticity and "fragmentation of consciousness" to essentially create alternate realities. I try to read at least 30 science fiction books a year, and I can say that this book takes a fresh and unique premise, but kind of never gets off the ground. The story is some mixture of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Neuromancer by William Gibson, and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Firstly, as a physician, the medical jargon and discussions are a bunch of nonsense. The premise is so convoluted that I think I would have greatly benefited from at least 2-3 introductory chapters of exposition. Instead, each chapter is told from a different perspective, with about 8 rotating narratives. The characters have no identity to follow because they are all spread across the multiverse with distributed consciousness. This book is honestly just about impossible to follow. The last book I read was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which has a similar idea of distributed consciousness, but it is much easier to follow because she actually takes time to explain what is going on and allows you to follow one narrator for more than 5-10 minutes at a time. The characters are so loosely distributed into the digital world (and many of them are just abandoned after 1-2 chapters) that they hardly resonate as discrete entities. The technology is very interesting, but the story relies so heavily on the technology as to be a detriment to the plot as a whole. Relatively speaking, this is the hardest plot to follow of any book I've ever read, mainly because each chapter is told from the perspective of a new character. I was constantly trying to look back and re-read things, but eventually I got tired of doing that and just tried to make it through to the end. Anyway, this book may be worth a shot, and I'm happy I saw the unique premise through to the end, but I will certainly not be continuing this series.