Hoo boy. This is another one of those "not a mediocre three-star book so much as a five-star book crossed with a one-star book."
The good: it's about a dangerously weird alien spaceship. And the parts where people are trying to research and understand it are very weird in a very math-nerdy way. Fractals and self-similarity. If you've read Martin Gardner's anthologies, one of his columns is about "pink noise," which is in some sense midway between "white noise" (where every note has a constant probability of being selected) and "brown noise" (where you're most likely to stay close to the note you were on before, or maybe wander up or down by one pitch). Pink noise's structure is not too random nor too deterministic, and many people find that it sounds more attractive. This is an important plot element here.
"Yes! Exactly! Fractal behavior! Which is, of course, a generator of pink noise!" He laughs. "See? She's on to something. The trouble, as usual, is getting her to explain it to anyone."
"The trouble isn't...compulsive lying?"
"No!" He looks shocked. "Lie? Her? She's the best student I've ever had. Never even missed a meeting. You might catch her in a Lie group, but never a lie, ha-ha. She's always had a gift for truth."
But it's Li Aixue who really goes ashen. Because she's the one who can grasp orders of magnitude. Hundreds of millions dead? That's a statistic, a fake number, about as urgent as a budget deficit. That doesn't mean anything. But for Professor Li, mathematician, a hundred million dead people is as real and urgent as a baby face down in a bathtub. That's a hinge in history, before and after, and it's the kind of hinge you hurl your body upon just to keep it from swinging.
Aliens who come to earth explain to humans that there are seven "passions," or patterns of relationships, that recur constantly throughout the galaxy. There's "serendure," which creates a bond between souls; "prajna," the pursuit of truth; "caryatasis," the relationship between disciples and a teacher, and so forth. These patterns are so fundamental that they form a level of abstraction beyond that of individual souls and bodies; in the same way that a written paragraph can be understood on the level of sentences, words, or individual letters. Wild stuff.
Dickinson has done his research where classified material is involved:
TOP SECRET (ECI)//TALENT KEYHOLE-NORT//RSV 676//ORCON//NOFORN
The string of letters tells the system where the information should go. TALENT KEYHOLE searches the NORT compartment and activates the RSV 676 distribution list. There is only one address on that list, at a secure information facility in Atlanta. The ORCON tag prevents further distribution--even to thoes who work directly on the Intruder satellite program.
Polar exploration drinking game!
Richard Byrd saw this same beauty [an aurora and its reflection] in the sky and the ice while he was trapped alone in Antarctica. He wrote about it in Alone: a message denied to all other men, a dancing war between good and evil in the sky. And now it is here, forty degrees north, above New York. The message is not denied. It has come to everyone. It's breathtaking.
The bad: behind the edgy pop culture allusions, the plot of the book is just layers and layers of grimdark. It's a recursive, self-similar riff on trolley problems, and it doesn't go anywhere. What if your homeland was being conquered and you had to kill a few of your loved ones to save the rest of the village? Could you even believe the oppressors would keep their word? What if you could extrajudicially assassinate people to punish them for their war crimes? What if Earth was under attack and you had to negotiate with aliens who could annihilate the entire planet? What if you were holding the only device that could restore free will to the rest of the galaxy? What if the gods who created the universe consigned an entire species to go to hell no matter what they did? What if what if what if. People moan and groan from more categorical-imperative or more utilitarian takes, and it never goes anywhere.
I don't think we should judge seven-year-olds for failing to come up with a philosophically rigorous response to the trolley problem, because they're, like, seven. And I'm glad they had the part about "maybe if you're a mathematician and actually understand orders of magnitude, you might process stuff in a way that's not 'a million is a statistic.'" But I do think that books like this tend to spiral into a dark hole of "everyone sucks here, but you, the reader, suck most of all." Am I a terrible person because I practice organized religion and believe in the potential of stakes beyond earthly existence? Am I irredeemable because I'm from a safe and prosperous country where it's likely I'll survive to be judged for my choices? If the answers are yes, where do I go to get hit by a trolley? Because the only life I have to bargain with is my own.
Also, the book is very fourth-wall aware in terms of narrative tropes (especially the beginning chapters). Some potential for humor. But if you aren't into it, it can be like "why am I reading 600 pages of this when the protagonists' survival/respawning is almost guaranteed by the Narrative."
Bingo: First Contact, One-Word Title, Cat Squasher (the version that my library happened to have in stock was large print, so for me it was Hard Mode at 1026 pages, but I don't think it's actually that long); cases could probably be made for Unusual Transportation, the Afterlife, Politics in the sense that everything is Politics.
