Edges (Inverted Frontier)

Edges is a science fiction space story about uploading and alien technology.

There's a lot of fun ideas here, like the captured alien spaceship that requires constant negotiation and consensus, or (similar to Children of Time) putting yourself to sleep for long periods of uninteresting time as needed, but ultimately this is a story a dictatorial spaceship captain, an invader, and the people caught between.

One thing I couldn't get past reading this was the horror of consciousness splitting. Sometimes people are instantiated into bodies and then it's "welp I'm done with this body now", but excuse me that new you was conscious and you just killed it? There's some nod to this, but mostly it's waved past in an unintentionally horrifying way.

It's much more serious than my usual kind of scifi. Like, it's spanning centuries and it's kinda technical in its descriptions of... stuff. It's also a little more heteronormative than I'm used to. But it's still cool.

Some things that I enjoyed: - copying your consciousness as needed, creating diverging timelines of yourself, both virtual and physical, communicating between them and merging them back together - the ship is alive and it's angry - sometimes you just sleep for a few centuries and tell the computer to wake you if anything interesting happens