The Downloaded

A short, fast tale of two groups reawakening after the fall of civilization, built around the premise that you need to keep a frozen person's consciousness active in VR...and there are very different reasons you might put people into cryo storage and a time-adjusted simulation. Not a lot of story, mainly character studies.

The everything-is-an-interview convention gets awkward after a while, at least as prose. But it wouldn't surprise me if it works better with the actual voice cast.

A bit more commentary at my website.

It bothered me that this was an audible Original before it was available to read. Sawyer obviously wrote the words before people could perform them and, in an ironic twist as a blind person, I don't actually like audiobooks so that kinda got under my skin. Not a problem with the book, just its release.

Also, to spin the ironymetre further, I read this at a time after a particularly strong set of Coronal Mass Ejections have set the night skies ablaze, and given how many times they're referenced in this story I had a bit of a kick out of that.

Good story otherwise, as is typical with one of the grandmasters of science fiction. The interview style worked well, although nobody's quite done it like Sylvain Newvel yet. Some nice throwbacks to Asimov, too. Worth the read, but not the hype.