The Measurements of Decay

Superb!. TMoD is a very unique and different book. It’s a neat SF with massive chunks of philosophy. It has also some sort-of-poetic lines, i.e :

“As was my habit, I followed the afternoon to the ocean and ended up lounging on a shore of corroded boulders. The waters golden, the horizon blood. The squawking of mindless seagulls. Alone, leering at passersby, I grinned as Saturn brightened and watched feral waves swallow the fireball, savoring the taste.”

“Come midnight, a turquoise aurora hung over the land. Not as a fragile drape gliding down against the stars, but as a slow whip to bleed the firmament of its mysteries. A though out of those celestial wounds she would divine the whereabouts of the men she hunted.”

Often times the author is more straightforward:

“Even though we have more time, it’s the wrong kind of time. Everything moves so fast, and there’s barely a moment to stop and think and-“ “And people don’t understand each other at all, and we have wider but more superficial knowledge, and good ideas get lost in the noise”.

“We had lived in a present built on tomorrows. Wasted tomorrows.”

And sometimes existentialism fills the void:

“-Do you think we have free will?. -I think about it. I don’t think about thinking about it.”

The philosophical stuff is more dense and harder to grasp in one of the three narratives, specially when the character is deep-thinking.

The thing is, you can still enjoy the book even if you don’t care about the philosophical and the different prose and by just following the plot. But it is certainty a much better experience at least trying to understand the “book-in-itself”. It was so good that I was tempted to reread it right away after finishing it.