The book description and preview, as well as existing reviews, do not disclose the genre well enough for a reader to decide if this book is for them.
This story is a long winded (economically priced) dystopian moral lesson in the ills of technology, broken utopias, and the issues arising from concealing things. The characters' understanding of the ground rules keep changing (somewhat like real life) which undermines their ability to take constructive action, and leads to failure for both protagonists and antagonists. Critique of flat characters is misguided. These are action figures and geeks, and the book is written for action or intellectual oriented readers, not those that routinely introspect in the modern style. The characters are fully and accurately developed for the type of characters that they are. But it is disappointing to get involved with them and see them fail so badly.
The following summary may contain more plot details than some readers want, but I prefer to know a little more about what I'm going to read.
Magic, in the beginning of the book, is a division of physics, following explicit rules, highly repeatable. Oddly, speaking is required, but no listener can be identified and there is no judgment or moral filter on the results of magic. Other inconsistencies appear in a series of disconnected and confusing episodes, often involving one-time use of unrelated characters. Magical artifacts exist which were made thousands or tens of thousands of years before magic was discovered. Only our star has the special core that generates the mana that powers magic, not other stars. Humans argue over whether these discrepancies are important.
Sisters Laura and Natalie lose their mother, who tries to save a doomed space shuttle crew, and in so doing displays far more magical ability than is possible at the time, adding to the mystery. Laura devotes herself to figuring this out. Laura is attacked, and develops thereafter shield tech which she shares with her sister. This aids them in later adventures. Though not enough.
A dreamscape is observed by numerous mages, and so it is apparent it has some objective reality. Recordings of magical events can be found, and so Laura gets the idea of possibly resurrecting her mother. Much of the book revolves around this plot point. At first, obtaining enough magic is a limiting factor. Each mage has only so much, but it can be stored. The dreamscape is dangerous, and mages can die there. On the opening day of college classes, in a demonstration involving Laura, Benji and another student, Benji is lost in the dreamscape, but this is not obvious because they have inadvertently created a copy of Benji which is occupied by a being that merely pretends to be Benji. Later this new Benji tries to blow up Laura and Natalie and much of Iceland. It is during this episode that they discover and rescue the original Benji.
After graduating and a failed attempt to use mana stored by her employer to rescue her mom, Laura swaps her boyfriend, Nick, for the mysterious demon of the dreamscape, to try and manipulate it and learn its power. This seems like a really, really stupid move when stated in the light of day. And it is. The being convinces her that magic was once unlimited and freely obtainable without detailed spells, and the group which discovered it first, The Wheel organization, locked it down.
Meanwhile, mostly due to their violent suppression of magic, Natalie and a man from Laura's old company discover the hidden conflict with The Wheel, and talk with its members, and get a different story. People who live in the real world have long been at war with a giant AI they have created which grants wishes. And with virtual people who essentially live in the AI, which is distributed everywhere, but its largest component is in the sun, thus it is an artificial sun god, Ra (Egyptian sun god). The main AI was defeated and locked down, but the key still exists (there is a big fuss about this, it's not supposed to) and Laura's mother may know where to find it. Thus some of the distributed components of Ra, not locked down but not themselves powerful enough, are helping Laura resurrect her mother. There is a dilemma trying to convince Laura, in the middle of the operation, which version is true.
Ra seems to represent the logical end point of technology and capitalism, and its ability to grant us whatever we want materially. But new grants destroy old grants. There is no morality to it. The novel projects we can't win, or shut it off, and the protagonists wind up living in a sort of hell which is temporarily pleasant but they have no purpose. This is an interesting commentary on whether virtual existence has meaning or not. But I do not appreciate being duped into reading a long, depressing dystopian novel in order to receive this commentary. The antagonists (not Ra, but The Wheel) suffer a slightly different fate which may or may not have more long term potential, but is worse for the foreseeable future.
The novel totally buys into the copy mentality. Ability to destroy and recreate a copy is the same as immortality. There is only a bare mention of the immense philosophical difficulty of this (namely that at each teleportation, one of the two experiences death).
This is the second novel by this author I have read. Both turned into quasi-horror stories. I probably won't read another one.
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